Slowtrain

To me this is where paranormal investigtaion needs to start. FIrst you need to begin to test if there are actual correlations between paranormal phenomena and reported "hauntedness" or is it all just anecdotal. DO non-haunted locations display the same phenomena as non-haunted locations. Yes? No? Absolutely the test environements need to be controlled and experiments have to be repeated over and over again, adjusting hypotheses and methodolgy as you go along. I can imagine it would be a relatively tedious and unrewarding task, which is probably why most paranomormal groups don't even bother. MUch more fun to just wave your gear around in the dark and make things up.

The way I see it, no single piece of evidence, no matter how convincing, isn't going to prove anything. What's going to prove something is when a procedure is estblished that anyone can follow and duplicate the same results. Even if you bring in a bigfoot body, if you only let one person see it and test it, and only one person can say OMG Bigfoot DNA!!!, then nothing has been proved. If you've got a bigfoot body you need to let everyone test it. If everyone tests it and ends up with the same results then you've got proof. Proof of something is never a one-off event.

What? DO you mean to say that bumbling around in a dark house with infrared cameras, emf detectors, and digitial thermoters, all they while shrieking about shadows and orbs and evps isn't a sensible set of scientific procedures? lol. Yeah, I agree, its a total joke. But it can be amusing. Someday paranormal investigators will realize that they need to create a rigorous methodology that anyone can follow and end up with the same results.

So often though hoaxes, fakery, mummery and assorted fabrications do in fact cause damage. EVen if only in the fact that they make it all that much more difficult to take any sort of paranormal inquiry seriously.

Indeed, And flight sims as well. Its hard to believe that here was once a time when flight sims were once such a big deal that CGW would review 1 or 2 new ones each MONTH. And nevermind the hardcore sims, nobody even makes the light flight sims anymore. Its totally a bummer. I really miss them.

I'll join the line of people that thinks you'll love FO3. For me it's a lot like Stalker in athmosphere and scavenger feeling (so far at least, I'm only lvl 9). Add to that some nice RPG-stats and everything is good. And a vast world where you can go wherever whenever. So basically it's Stalker like Stalker should have been (or at least Stalker like the devs said it would be). Minus the russians. (ok, so combat differs. It's much faster in FO3. It's playable as a straight shooter, but for me that burns too much ammo and results in a dead character a bit too often. Strategic moving and use of Vats is the way to go) Unlike Volourn, the vast number of people on this board who I know disliked or at least saw the flaws of Oblivion but think Fallout 3 is at least very good, have sold me on the game. SO thank you all!

lol. I've got more than 100 hours into Far Cry 2 and really enjoy it. It's the thing that is keeping me from buying FO3. When I am done with FC2, then I shall commence FO3. Either that or King's Bounty. Or Dead Space. Haven't actually decided between the three yet. I love choices!

Very much so. Or the newly coined term for it "matrixing". lol. Thanks, Jay and Grant! Again for me that falls into the realm of the unreliablity of human perceptions. We want to see something that we understnd, to bring order out of chaos, so we work very hard to impose structure and meaning where there really isn't any. And then we only end up deceiving ourselves. I always find it interesting that so many people who report paranormal experiences are always so quick to assume they have in fact experienced something beyond the normal rather than that they have just experienced a failure or limitation of their own preceptions.

Every time somebody says something like this I feel like running out and buying FO3. One of these days I will. And kudos to Bethesda for being able to drop the craptastic design of Oblivion in the dust and move forward. I can only hope that ES5 will incorporate a great deal of Fallout 3 and whole lot less of Oblivion. That would be sweet.

Doesn't mention anything about UFO's though. Still an interesting take. Really though, I think the overwhelming majority of UFO sightings are the result of misidentificaton of known objects. Human perception is pretty unreliable to begin with and some people tend to be extremely quick to consider something paranormal or extraterrestrial or whatever without a whole lot of evidence other than their own conviction. Many of the remaining sightings can be out down to fraud, either through fabrication or hoaxing. Why people seem to feel the need to lie and fake stuff is beyond me, but they do. However, there does seem to be a small number of sightings that really appear to not fall into either of the above 2 categories. WHich doesn't mean they are alien space ships of course, but nonetheless remains an interesting mystery. What is unfortunate is that while there are many people who simply believe in UFO's regardless of a lack of evidence or even a preponderance of evidence to the contrary, there are also people who simply dismiss the possibility outright. Both approaches seem to me equally close-minded and not very commendable. Probably I just watched too much In Search Of when I was a kid, but I find the potential for mystery intriguing.

Actually the black shape does kind of look like the Millenium Falcon in a straight on pov. Hmm.

I guessed that the white background was either clouds or mountains covered with snow or both blending together and the black object in the center was the UFO. But really I have no idea. I can't even tell if it is a photo of a large and distant vista or an extreme close up of somebody's arse end.

Defintely that first picture, taken in 1870, is pretty meaningless. To me it just looks like a black blob on a white background. It could just as easily be a dragon as a UFO. The second one could be a plane, since it appears to be larger and darker to the left than to the right, faintly indicating a ****pit trailing back to a tail assembly. The third one is slightly more interesting since it appears round with areas of even spaced highlights, but without knowing how close to the camera it is, you can't really tell if it is a tiny chunk of something flying by in the wind or something larger up in the sky. The fourth one looks more like a small bit of something flying by close to the lens. It appeats to have the same light source as the man, lit from above, shadowed below. The shadow line would seem to indicate that it is somewhat spherical. But yeah they are all pretty vague. By the time you get to the 1950's all photos have to be considered hoaxes first and foremost, since some people seem to really enjoy creating those sorts of things for whatever reason, and by the 1950's the modern UFO craze was in full swing.

That's true. But my point was more that the public awareness of UFO's didn't really take off until the 40's and 50's. If someone in the 20's was interested in making some sort of hoax photo, they most likely would have choosen a medium with ectoplasm coming from her nose as the photo subject not a flying saucer. Seances and the paranormal were very much a part of the public consciousness even then, UFOs were not. Anyway, I'm not saying that age makes them any more real than a contemporary photo, only that I find it interesting that photos of UFOs go back that far.

Those are some pretty cool photos. No doubt many of them are hoazes and mis-ids, but still, you gotta wonder, would anybody have even thought of hoaxing a UFO photo in 1920? And there wasn't a whole heck of a lot of manmade objects in the sky at that point. Besides biplanes, zeppelins, barrage balloons, and Lord Lucan? I said that there wasn't a whole heck of a lot, not that there weren't any. That statement was relative to humanity's presence in the skies around and above earth today.

Do you fall and die a lot?

Those are some pretty cool photos. No doubt many of them are hoazes and mis-ids, but still, you gotta wonder, would anybody have even thought of hoaxing a UFO photo in 1920? And there wasn't a whole heck of a lot of manmade objects in the sky at that point.

Part of it has to do with the credibility of the person making the claims. If some moron like myself who knows nothing about radar were to start talking about msyterious contacts, it would be pretty normal to doubt that I had any idea what I was talking about. But if a trained fighter pilot makes those same claims, I would have assumed that the pilot was more than competent in interpreting radar readings. Maybe they couldn't build or troubleshoot a radar array, but they should be able to know what it's telling them so they don't launch a missle at a flight of geese. Also just to clarify for the sake of clarity, this particular had nothing to do with UFO Hunters as far as I know.

Can we disprove bigfoot with radar?

taks is my radar hero. UFO Hunters should add him to their team.

Nyarlathotep

SO wait, are you saying cultural sensitivity, often to an absurd degree is odd? I think its totally predictable. Many people seem unable to seperate the fantasy of a game world from the reality of the real world. I personally think its totally ridiculous, but its definitely not odd or unusal.

I don't think it is odd, per se.

Kevin Costner was so close!