Observation and Paranormal Videos

Last night, as is my wont, I spent the last hour or so before bed watching YouTube videos. I often watch a funny take on politics (Seth Meyers or Stephen Colbert), or movies, or unexplained phenomena…ordinary, average stuff. I also like to indulge in channels that post curated ‘ghost videos.’ As most open-minded people do, I look first to debunk for natural causes, then to debunk for potential hoaxing, and if neither of those pan out, I file it away in my mental save file labeled ‘Hmmm’ (filed under ‘I’ for ‘Interesting’).

One of my favorite channels for this type of video is Nuke’s Top 5. While his titles are often hyperbolic, he tends to present his selections in a calm fashion, never sensationalistic, and generally serves up intriguing clips without passing judgment or arriving at conclusions. It’s a breath of fresh air in the over-excited world of paranormal video channels. 

Here’s last night’s if you’d like to take a look—

One of the clips (the second in order of presentation), takes place in a home in which the lady of the house spots what looks like, for all intents and purposes, a Shadow Person…specifically, the Hat Man. For anyone who hasn’t heard of Shadow People before, they’re just that—entities who present themselves as a shadow rather than fully formed. The Hat Man is also a Shadow Person, but with a hat. (According to lore, the Hat Man is supposedly more dangerous than a regular Shadow Person.) Shadow People are intriguing, but that’s a discussion for another time.

What I want to address right now is why so many entities may be turning up on video these days. I’m not talking about dust or bugs, but actual, seemingly sentient entities. Shadow People, ghosts, cryptids, etc. My theory (and it’s more of a hypothesis at this point) looks to the quantum realm for expectation. Bear with me a moment, and I’ll explain.

Everyone (or nearly everyone) is familiar with the double-slit experiment, in which scientists fired a stream of electrons through two slits in some blocking material. When left by itself, with no humans present, the data presented as a set of random strikes on the wall/measurement pad on the far side of the slit. If the scientist was in the room, the data presented as a series of bars. The idea here is that the act of observation collapses the waveform (in which light is behaving as both a wave and a particle) into just a wave.

Okay, so that was confusing. Let’s try Schrödinger’s Cat.  In this experiment, a cat is sealed in a box with a vial full of poison, with one atom of material preventing the vial from releasing its deadly gas. Once the atom decays, the poison will be released, and the cat dies. However, we have no way of knowing exactly when the atom will decay, so the cat exists in two states at once—alive and dead. Only by opening the box can we actually take that measurement, and the waveform collapses, leaving us either with a living cat or a kitty corpse. Either way, I’m calling the ASPCA.

But back to the paranormal—observation isn’t just what we can see with our eyes, it’s about what instruments can detect. So, isn’t it possible that there exist entities all around us that we can’t detect, given our limited range of vision, hearing and so on? I think that it is.

Truly, any or all of the ghost videos we see on YouTube could be faked with some clever editing (in fact, I’m all but certain that the Jordanian video Nuke shows in the above countdown is a hoax). But isn’t there a possibility that as we record more and more aspects of our lives, some of our man-made instruments can more accurately measure the world around us? And that heretofore unknown or unproven phenomena can be detected, and then observed by us?

I think the answer may well be ‘yes.’  And if so, as we continue to Snap and Insta and Facebook every detail of our lives, isn’t it likely that more and more entities are going to show up? Also a yes, in my opinion.

As we observe more of our world, we may well begin to truly see that which actually exists.