Ever since the commercial airline missiles destroyed New York City’s World Trade Center on 9/11/01, images of violence and catastrophe have seared the collective mind. A popular image shot by freelance photographer Mark Phillips seemed to capture the face of a demon in a large plume of smoke emanating from one of the twin towers. Soon after the Associated Press secured one-time printing rights to the so-called “smoke demon” image, it became available to Internet users who quickly disseminated it with foreboding commentary about the Christian apocalypse.42
The image appeared in newspapers across the country and George W. Bush’s speeches took on an air of public exorcism, the spiritual confrontation between good and evil; “…just as some people found demons in the smoke of the World Trade Center’s destruction in their attempts to organize and contain anxiety, so did Bush’s speechwriters amplify the ‘terrorist’ attacks on U.S. soil as a violent, spiritual confrontation with hidden, malicious forces.”43
Witchcraft, Satanism, infant sacrifice, and exorcism still form the stories told in our collective lives. Our brave new world is a veneer over an ancient one. While we may have progressed much in the fields of science and technology, can we really attest to having developed as much in the realm of the spiritual, emotional, and social? There are still witch-hunts, both symbolic and literal; there are still exorcisms; there are still legends of things in the woods and images of gods from the heavens before whom we tremble and shake. It is, however, during the times of greatest distress and social upheaval that we collectively and publicly turn to these long-held and hidden beliefs. They form the backbone of our social organization. It wasn’t just happenstance that the Salem witch trials occurred on American soil; it was the culmination of ancient beliefs and fears in a new, strange land in a new and strange time. Whenever the land and time become strange to us, during those times of uncertainty and upheaval, we resort to those old beliefs and we find our witches and put them on trial again.
CHAPTER 14
The Ghost Hunter Age: Today’s Paranormal Movement
So what of today’s paranormal movement? It is a period of time marked by an explosion of television programs focused on the paranormal that have proved to be quite successful for a number of different channels, including National Geographic, the History Channel, A&E, the Syfy Channel, and Discovery. The recent spike in public interest in the paranormal comes after a lull during the 1990s as the nation attempted to regain its senses and forget about the satanic panic of the 1980s. It also comes on the heels of life-altering changes in technology, politics, and the devastating terrorist attacks of 9/11.
The period of time defining the ghost hunter age, like all the previous paranormal ages, is loosely defined and, as indicated before, does not mean that the beliefs disappear; it only means that public interest subsides during the intervals. Also, as demonstrated in chapter 6, each paranormal age is defined by the focus of paranormal interest as it relates to the recent social changes, largely spurred by changes in science and technology. The focus on witchcraft during the European witch craze was influenced by the Copernican revolution; the Spiritualist movement was tied to the Darwinian revolution; the flying saucer invasion was tied to the atomic age and Cold War fears; and the satanic panic was tied to the attempt to institutionalize folklore through therapeutic expertise. But these were not the only factors that contributed to the panics and movements; as in any social movement, there were a large number of factors. The repetition of the spike in paranormal belief, combined with the development of science and technology, recurs often enough to postulate a relationship between the two. Likewise, the current paranormal age can be tied to similar factors. The ghost hunter age has been spurred by three major changes to society: the sequencing of the human genome, the invention and adoption of the Internet, and the terrorist attacks on 9/11. These three factors have combined to create a spike in public interest in the paranormal, as evidenced by the numerous television programs dealing with the paranormal and recent polling data that indicates as many as 75 percent of Americans believe in some form of the paranormal.1
I am referring to this recent paranormal age as the ghost hunter age because of the success of the Syfy Channel’s program Ghost Hunters, which features two men who are plumbers by day and ghost hunters at night. This program, with its “reality television” style and its reliance on technology as a means to find evidence of the paranormal, is the definitive manifestation of the current paranormal age. While there are several other programs and styles of program, Ghost Hunters has come to mark the pop-culture phenomenon of paranormal fascination.
Like all the ages before it, this one, too, must come to an end. In October of 2010 I attended a live presentation by the Ghost Hunters themselves, Jason and Grant. The theater was filled to capacity with an interested audience. Jason and Grant took the stage, not as paranormal plumbers, but as consummate showmen. With a large screen behind them, they dominated the stage. The show was animated and well performed, but mostly, it was funny and entertaining. The audience laughed with the two men over stories of crazed homeowners who believed their homes were haunted. There was merchandise for sale from The Atlantic Paranormal Society (TAPS). They showed grainy, night vision footage and pointed out the supposed ghost in each.
However, as funny and entertaining as the show was, the video evidence they presented was underwhelming. While Jason and Grant hinted at more revealing and terrifying encounters, they apologized that they were unable to show that footage due to privacy concerns for the people involved. But more revealing than the show itself was the audience reaction to the two men; the questions and comments focused on the relationships of present and former TAPS members, and numerous women fawned over the two men. It became apparent that the paranormal fascination had become an industry of fame, and that the audience was more fascinated with seeing two people who were on television than in any ghostly research. The audience came to see the living embodiment of the two spectral figures who haunt the television in their homes every Wednesday night. The paranormal had taken a back seat to a reality television fad; it had crossed the boundary between inquiry and entertainment—and entertainment can be as fickle and fleeting as the wind. The commercialization of the paranormal will ultimately be the end of the ghost hunter age. When it becomes too mainstream the paranormal will, inevitably, transform and move back to the periphery of society. I believe that day is coming soon.
However, it is important to examine the factors that have led to this recent age of paranormal fascination because, as surely as the ghost hunter age will end, another will begin. Considering the global impact that these ages have had on people’s lives and on the course of history, studying the causes and outcomes of these social movements is important to the understanding of human history and human nature. Thus, we will begin our examination of the ghost hunter age with the advent of the Internet.
THE INTERNET
The Internet began as a military project in the 1960s that was designed to integrate the computer systems of different military bases and programs. The initial research and development was headed up by some of the finest and most prestigious institutions in the United States, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It was developed over the next 30 years until it was finally introduced to the public in the mid-1990s. The commercialization of the Internet has resulted in possibly the most significant technological change to human life since the discovery of electricity. As of 2010, according to Internet World Stats, approximately two billion people worldwide are now connected to the Internet, the majority of those users coming from the wealthier Western nations in Europe and North America.2 Usage across the world is expanding daily as the Internet begins to penetrate into the social and technological systems of third world Asian countries. The Internet has served to connect people in every country through one integrated medium and, unlike the television, has enabled them to actually participate in that medium and interact with each other. Today the Internet is used for business, advertising,
communicating, building and/or maintaining relationships, news, research, entertainment, gambling, day trading, thievery and crime, opinions, and goofing off on the boss’s dollar. People interact with each other under new names—aliases that separate them from their identity, making them simultaneously connected and anonymous; truly, ghosts in the machine. The average U.S. citizen has the ability to connect to the entire world in the matter of a few keystrokes and a few seconds; fortunes and fame are created online, changing the dynamic of Hollywood and the recording industry and making “stars” out of nearly anyone willing to put him- or herself on YouTube.
The result is a 24-hour, self-generating media blitz; cable news runs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and simultaneously generates news stories online. The average cable news anchor has a laptop in front of him and is plugged into the Internet that is streaming news from sources around the world. The Internet has resulted in a kind of limbo; the citizen of the United States or some other Westernized nation who is plugged into the 24-hour media cycle exists in a suspended state of information coming and going. As information is received, it is simultaneously old information at one end of the cycle and new information at the other, and the viewer exists trapped in the middle. Existing in the strange, nebulous world of the Internet results in the feeling of being groundless. Even the structural concept of the Internet closely resembles a star nebula that is suspended in dark, infinite outer space.
It is this groundless state of existence that now fuels and informs our ever-expanding and information-saturated world and has also fueled the ghost hunter age. The Internet has resulted in the dissolution of truth, the promulgation of apocalyptic fears, and the ability for people to find new and different belief systems, all while broadcasting their lives around the world. Ghosts exist in an ethereal world between the past and present; between the living and the dead; the existent and the nonexistent. Likewise, the new Internet world exists in a similar state of being and nonbeing. We communicate with the living through the nonliving computer; we form relationships with beings that we cannot see and know only by a name or a face that may or may not be their actual name or face; we simultaneously receive information and dispense information and are now members of a country numbering nearly three billion users as opposed to three hundred million. The Internet has made us at once smaller and bigger, powerful and powerless. The entire system exists in a state of contradiction. As discussed in the chapter “The Native Paranormal,” the contradiction inherent in the founding of the United States fueled belief in the haunting presence of Native Americans; likewise the inherent contradictions of the Internet also fuel belief in the paranormal.
During my childhood, my father had a nightly tradition; every evening at 6:30 p.m. he would sit down and watch the nightly news with Dan Rather, and I watched with him. Every evening Rather’s voice—authoritative, intense, and God-like—resounded in our cozy living room; it commanded attention and dispensed truth. For us and much of civilization at the time, information about the world and the current state of humanity was garnered through the evening news and the newspapers, and, for the most part, these institutions had a monopoly on the truth; they presented the world to us and shaped our perception of it through their manipulation of words, images, and ideas. We could rest well at night if Dan Rather confirmed that, for tonight, everything was okay.
The Internet has changed all that. Now instead of one voice ushering the truth into our homes, there are literally millions. News reports now stream 24 hours a day from competing news agencies allied with different political parties, who mold and shape the news to suit their interests; the blogosphere empowers ordinary citizens who do not work for any news organization to suddenly become reporters of the truth, and, in some cases, actually become relevant voices in the information cycle. Video via YouTube is streamed directly into the home through the Internet and cable news shows, from the cell phones and cameras of people around the world, sometimes in places that no journalist would have access to; and scientific information is acquired directly alongside contradictory scientific information. This is the democratization of information, but it is also the dissolution of truth, or, at the very least, the idea of truth. There are many reasons why this is a positive change for society; however, the loss of any notion of truth has created a void in our understanding of reality. Being groundless and left to float in the ether, we find ourselves communing with ghosts; searching for our own personal truth to questions for which there are no real answers outside personal perception.
To illustrate the effects of the democratization of information and the dissolution of truth, let us use the example of the global warming debate. “Debate” is the key word, because 25 years ago there would have been no debate. A group of scientists would have declared that empirical data showed that the earth was warming due to increased carbon in the atmosphere and that this was going to cause widespread environmental distress. A similar event actually did occur during the 1980s with the discovery of the hole in the ozone layer over Antarctica. Regulations were put into place that banned the substances and gases suspected of causing the hole, and, as National Geographic reported in May of 2010, “Today the ozone hole, which was first spotted 25 years ago, appears headed for a happy ending, thanks to unprecedented international action.”3 There was scientific consensus, which was reported by the media as being factual and “the truth”; and due to the subsequent action taken by the international community, it appears disaster has been avoided. Today, the ozone hole is a nonissue except that, as indicated in the same National Geographic article, the closing of the ozone hole may actually contribute to further global warming. The irony does not go unnoticed.
However, a very similar situation has occurred over the past decade with a remarkably dissimilar outcome; global warming, although pronounced as fact by compendiums and conferences of scientists, remains a debate rather than an accepted fact. Global warming has not been able to establish itself as a “truth”; “truth” has been rendered subjective largely because of the Internet and the availability of information, opinion, and technology. As a result, some people, politicians, and scientists accept global warming as fact while others do not, and some even claim that it is a hoax. What has changed in this period of time between the discovery of the ozone hole and the global warming alarm? It is the democratization of information through the 24-hour media cycle and unprecedented global access to information. It is also an irony that more information has led to less truth—to more questions than answers.
To a certain extent, truth has always been subjective, but that rested more with personal truths rather than public truths. Each individual may have had their own take on issues in the past, but with the advent of the Internet, those individual viewpoints have now become a part of the public discourse, and, in some cases, garnered much attention and public following. The Internet’s unparalleled ability to connect people and ideas have allowed prominent scientists whose findings may be contrary to the popular opinion the ability to spread their findings and broadcast them to the world at large. A scientist such as Dr. Roy Spencer, who is openly critical of the belief that global warming is man-made, is able to offer his ideas, opinions, and research to the global community through his website. A very well-credentialed man, Spencer is a small voice in the scientific community regarding global warming, but his conclusions represent one of the inherent difficulties in the democratization of information—his ability to connect with billions of people.
This, of course, is not necessarily a bad thing, although global warming advocates bemoan the voices of those who disagree with their findings. If, in fact, global warming is not man-made or is actually yet another of mankind’s mass panics, similar to The Population Bomb panic of the 1970s that asserted the earth could not continue to support its population growth and predicted mass starvation, then the work of these few objecting scientists is important to the lives of individuals and the interests of governments and business around the world. Similar to The
Population Bomb’s dire warning of mass starvation, the United Nations warned of 50 million “environmental refugees” by 2010 due to global warming.4 When these predictions failed to materialize by 2010, scientists reset the date for 2020 instead.5 The fact that the cataclysmic and dire predictions regarding global warming have yet to be seen, combined with the availability of differing viewpoints and information, has resulted in a dramatic decrease in the number of people who consider it priority.
What has occurred is a virtual stalemate; no direct action has been taken by the international community as in the case of the ozone hole, and the protracted debate has left a public largely lackadaisical regarding global warming. Only time will tell if this is fortunate or disastrous.
Perhaps one of the biggest changes to science since the advent of the Internet is that science is no longer “science.” For nearly every scientific study and conclusion, one can go online and find a different set of studies and statistics that point to the opposite conclusion. Researchers and scientists flaunt their credentials (sometimes impressive) and tout their conclusions, but what would have been hard science is now being called into question by the average citizen. While the scientists among us may be able to draw their own conclusions, the new subjective nature of science leaves the average layperson with no firm understanding of what is actually occurring in the world. There is no truth. This same model can be applied to nearly every aspect of life in which a person seeks stability upon which to build their notion of reality; politics, religion, history, current events, and science are now more fluid than ever before, and the United States is awash in the ebb and flow of the Internet’s tide of information.
The democratization of information that began with the JFK assassination, when average citizens decided not to accept the official story but investigate for themselves, has reached its ultimate zenith—a world in which truth and facts are subjective to the pre-conceived notions of the viewer. Some philosophers will argue that this has always been the case, and that may be, but never has it been on such wild display and had such far-reaching implications as it now does; the questions that once may have been only for the philosophers have spilled over into the masses. Unfortunately, when we remove truth and fact from the world, we are left with faith; and faith is the realm of the paranormal—a realm that holds no absolutes, no empirical evidence, no grounding upon which to set our feet. Our society has become simultaneously faithless and yet full of faith in whatever institution we choose.
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