As someone who’s been a technician in the electronic industry for roughly thirty years, I often find myself hanging my head in disbelief when someone equates equipment failure to any sort of paranormal phenomena.  So many times I’ve witnessed equipment failure, and some of those failures are truly bizarre.  From units that powered off and wouldn’t turn back on for minutes or hours later, to units that would only fail under a specific sequence of events and function perfectly if those events didn’t happen in the exact order and within certain time restraints.  Basically failures that don’t make sense yet occur because of all the variables that are in play whenever any electronic device is powered up.

Yet these failures are often linked to the paranormal as evidence that the paranormal was the cause.  I have to say that those that are making such assumptions lack the experience and knowledge about electronics to realize how ridiculous that assumption is, and once again they are using coincidental evidence to base their premise on.  Electronic devices are definitely fallible.  This I know all too well since I made a living of it for decades, and while I surely haven’t seen every type of failure, I have seen more freak failures than you can shake a stick at.

Here’s a prime example of a piece of equipment that failed and how it was at first thought to be related to the paranormal: A friend of mine was doing some investigation work at a house where the owners had called in his team to see if the reason they were having problems renting one of their houses was related to the house being haunted.  The last tenant reported a menacing shadow figure, which had been witnessed in the master bedroom, which is also where one of the former owners was found dead.  Apparently that owner had died in their sleep of natural causes.  The house had been vacant for about two months and the owners had kept the thermostat set to 45 degrees in order to keep pipes from freezing.  That all having been said, my friend began to investigate the house one night.  The next day I got an excited call from him telling me he had a hot location and some pretty convincing evidence.

Well, as much as I wanted to believe him since we had been looking for an ‘active’ location, I had my doubts since he was still convinced that orbs were significant evidence of paranormal activity.  After having arrived at his house he began telling me about the place and how he had begun provoking the spirit as he made his way towards the back bedroom.  Then, just as he approached the threshold to the bedroom and was demanding the spirit appear so he could record it, his camera went dead.  I of course asked him about the battery and such to which he told me that he tried another battery and no matter what he did he could not get the camera to come back on until he got back home and tried it.  I then examined the camera and found no apparent faults, but having seen so many bizarre failures of electronic equipment I was still skeptical.  So, after finding out we still had access to the location, we arranged to both go back with his team and see if we couldn’t retrace their steps, only this time I was going to be nothing more than an observer.

Well it wasn’t long before they had unpacked and setup their equipment when he once again began provoking the spirit only this time his camera went dead before he even approached the bedroom.  His excitement level jumped as he became even more convinced, but that didn’t last as I noted that the other two cameras they had been using were still functioning.  Handing him one of those cameras I asked that he continue.  This time he made it to the bedroom and was in there a good 30 minutes without so much as a glitch.  Disappointed he moodily ordered the end of the investigation and we returned to his place where once again the camera began to function.

Still not convinced that his camera was the issue, it had finally dawned on me to try a little experiment with his camera.  Knowing that temperature can influence intermittent defects, I took his camera out on his back deck and turned it on, playing back the tape that he had just recorded on.  Granted it was a little cooler outside than in that house, but it was within five degrees so I let the tape continue to play and then the camera powered down, just as it did in the house.  It wasn’t at the same exact spot on the tape but it was within six minutes, and now the camera wouldn’t power back up.  Still not convinced, or I should say not wanting to believe the truth, he argued that my experiment was invalid and proved nothing.  That being said and since the camera was still under warranty, I finally convinced him to send it in for repair and wrote a note to the technician about the defect.

Well, several weeks later he received the camera back, and there in the technicians notes was what I had suspected.  A cold solder joint on one of the connectors.  Ever since then he’s used the camera (at least last I heard), and he’s never had another issue with it ever since then.

This is just one example of the thousand upon thousands of other equipment failures that can happen with electronic devices.  So, if you’re one of those that’s had an unusual equipment failure and believe it to be evidence of the paranormal I ask this, “are you sure it wasn’t simply a malfunction?”

In part three we will look at what people often perceive about batteries, or I should say what false perceptions people have of batteries and how they function.

Batteries are like little fuel tanks

This is how many people think of batteries.  While in a sense this is true, it’s not that cut and dry.  Batteries do go dead, but it’s not like a tank of gasoline where when the tank has run dry there is no more fuel to burn.  Batteries are deceiving in when they are “out of fuel”.  Often a battery has lost it’s capacity to push an adequate amount of current and the device it’s powering will stop functioning.  But this does not mean the battery is “empty”, and often if a device is powered off for a bit of time the device will start functioning again if it is turned back on.  ”Why is that?” you may ask and the reason is simple; it is because the chemical reaction that creates the charge/current in the first place has continued and has built up more electrical charge.  This is where fuel tanks and batteries differ.  While it can be easily witnessed if a fuel tank is empty or not, a battery cannot be examined and it’s current capacity cannot be so easily determined.

Voltage can tell whether or not a battery is charged

This is another big misconception about batteries.  A battery that is not in a device and has no load on it can show the appropriate voltage, yet not have enough current capacity to even power up a device momentarily.  In order to tell if a battery has a sufficient charge to power a device it must be placed under a load.  Even then, there’s no guarantees as to how long it can power a device since other variables that were mention in Part II come into play.

Voltage can tell if there is a drain on a battery

This is only partially true, and without a discharge curve is near impossible to accomplish.  Many batteries are good at producing a consistent voltage over a broad range of loads which make measuring the voltage across the battery useless in establishing an accurate current draw.  The best and only way to measure current draw on a battery is to measure the flow of electrons with an ammeter, or to put a low value resistor between the battery and the load/device that the current will flow through, measure the voltage drop across the resistor and then calculate the current flow through that resistor (Ohm’s Law).

Electronic devices draw a consistent amount of current

This is only partially true with things like flashlights.  For devices such as radios, cellphones, voice recorders, video cameras, and most other devices, current draw changes dramatically during the use of the device.  This is especially false with any device that has a micro-controller in it, which includes all of the devices I just listed.  Micro-controller current requirements vary from clock cycle to clock cycle, and also vary depending on the other devices they are connected to and control.  Take for instance a video camera.  While recording, the current requirements are higher than when idle.  In fact, the current requirements change as the image the camera sees changes.  This is true with most other devices as well.  A radio transmitter uses more current when someone is transmitting a voice over the transmission than it does if there is no voice transmitting; and even then, the variations in the sound as the voice conveys a message vary the current requirements.

EVPs have always fascinated me since I have recorded a few myself, and at the time thought that I had some good evidence.  But as I listened to them and had started to shift away from the group think of the paranormal community, I began applying my knowledge of electronics to them and began to realize that they were polluted evidence.

In my observations there’s two basic types of EVPs: those that are clear and easy to discern the message, and those that are weak and subject to the interpretation of each individual.  The most common of these two appears to be the weak ones that are usually buried in background noise, and with the use of digital voice recorders are often a by product of audio artifacting cause by the poor sampling rate and compression algorithems that do not accurately reconstruct the sound.  The latter problem is one of growing concern as investigators flock to purchase these cheap recorders without ever considering the major issues surrounding their recording quality and the fact that they automatically pollute the evidence.  To those who choose these recorders I have to wonder why.  Why use a piece of equipment that is prone to producing false evidence?  One of the reasons I see is that investigators do not know about the pollution issue with these recorders, which takes us back to another major problem and that is investigators are not learning enough about the equipment they are using, or lack the effort to learn about their equipment.  Neither reason inspires confidence in an investigator’s seriousness about investigating as both suggest the investigator is more interested in “spook hunting” than actual research.  After all, what’s the point in knowingly collecting polluted evidence?

The other issue with EVP’s that are weak is that they become subjective to the brain’s pattern recognition mechanism.  Pattern recognition is how are brains deal with the flood of information they receive from our senses and turn that flood of information into something we can deal with and comprehend.  But this is also where the brain becomes prone to false interpretation of information.  Because our brain is geared towards recognizing and interpreting patterns it can easily substitute the wrong interpretation for a particular pattern.  A good example of patter recognition is a visual one and that is the typical smiley face.  Our brains take a circle, an arc, and two dots, run it through pattern recognition and we see a face.  The same thing happens with audio where our brain inputs the sound, matches it to the most common pattern, and is then fed to us as to what what the sound is.  If the patterns are vague, such as in an EVP like we are discussing, the brain can come up with a variety of false perceptions.  One easy way to see this is to play an EVP of this nature to one hundred people and sit back and listed to the wide variety of interpretations of the meaning of that EVP.  An EVP with such a broad range of interpretation can hardly be considered significant since there are so many things that it can be, including sources that are natural sounds in the environment but are being misinterpreted by our brain because the background noise is obscuring certain patterns in the sound, thus leading our brain’s pattern recognition to come up with a false recognition of the sound.

The most sinister of all the problems is radio transmissions, or RF.  EVPs that are of this type of pollution can be of either type of EVP, i.e. weak or strong.  Now I know many investigators have gone to great lengths to make sure that any EVPs recorded cannot be RF in nature.  Some have gone to the trouble of setting up scanners, spectrum analyzers, and a host of other RF detectors an believe that they have taken more than adequate measures to screen out the possibility of an EVP being an RF transmission.  But all of that effort is for naught.  Because of the nature of RF and how it behaves much like waves in the ocean, there is no way to screen out random transmission by simply monitoring the RF spectrum.  The reason behind this can be seen when observing ripples in a pond or the waves in the ocean.  Where some ripples or waves re-enforce each other, others have a diminutive effect.  This same thing happens with RF waves, and while you may have a location that has a strong signal, you can also have a location just a meter or so away where there is no signal.  Herein lies part of the problem with the use of screening through monitoring.  While you’re equipment shows no signal where you’re equipment is station, meters away where the recorder is placed there may be a spot where the signals are quite strong.

But this isn’t the only issue with RF.  There are a slew of other things that come into play with RF such as skip, the ever changing reflective environment, harmonics, the constantly changing RF transmissions, and the susceptibility to RF that many recording devices, especially cheap ones, are prone to.  Each of these elements comes into play when recording EVPs, and each pokes holes into the idea that screening is enough to rule out RF contamination.  In fact, the only way to be sure to screen out RF is to construct a Faraday cage that has been properly tested and has shown to screen out RF contamination.  Without that, there is no way to be sure if an EVP is nothing more than a by product of an RF transmission.

“But the EVP matches the question,” is something I’ve often heard from investigators when trying to justify an EVP and give it credibility.  But what those who would argue such a point is they are forgetting the odds of catching a coincidental EVP, as well as looking at the hit to miss ration in the evidence.  For instance: how many questions were asked, how many replies were there in relationship to the number of questions asked, and how many coincided with the questions answered?  This is where things seem to go awry.  Many times I’ve heard how investigators will get one coincidental EVP after asking numerous questions and getting maybe a 33% response rate.  In those cases I have to ask if the ‘spirit’ was so inclined to answer then why weren’t the other responses in line with the questions? Let’s say in this case there were 100 questions asked and 33 responses, again a 33% hit rate. Now out of those 33 only one fits with the question, which would be a 3% hit rate when compared only to the number of responses, and a 1% hit rate when compared to total number of questions.  Those aren’t very impressive numbers and if we look at an example I used in the article Data Collection in Paranormal Investigations, which shows how small segments of data can often result in bad conclusions.  This example seems to ring very true when it comes to EVPs, especially since most investigators do not seem to be keeping proper score as to the hit/miss ratio.

So, when it comes to EVPs investigators need to be very careful about including them as evidence.  First, spend the money on a recording device that can accurately reproduce the sound they record.  Digital voice recorders are useless because they can distort a sound due to their crappy sample rate and compression, therefore they pollute the evidence and make it untrustworthy.  Second, any EVP that is played to 100 people and produces numerous interpretations isn’t worth pursuing since it can’t be established if it is truly a message from beyond or simply a noise that sort of resembles a response.  Third, any EVP captured outside of a RF shield, such as Faraday Cage, must be disregarded since there is no way to prove that it was not a transmission from one of the millions of radio transmissions that take place at any given time.

Okay, now let’s look at little of the science behind batteries, starting with your typical alkaline battery.  Believe it or not, batteries have a shelf life. This is because they use chemical reactions to create the electrical charge and that chemical reaction only lasts for so long, even if the batteries are never used. Batteries are also temperature sensitive. This is once again because of chemical reactions, and those reactions are temperature sensitive. Cold batteries do not perform well and hot batteries lose charge at a faster rate, even when not being used. Basically, batteries do not like temperature extremes, and both extremes reduce shelf life and overall life of the battery. Therefore, just because a battery is new does not guarantee it has full current capacity, or, in layman terms it does not guarantee the battery is full. Batteries stored in temperature extremes, such as the majority of warehouses across the U.S.A. experience during the extreme seasons, will inevitably have their capacity affected.

Rechargeable batteries have even greater issues because they involve a charger circuit that can only make a calculated guess as to level of charge the battery is at during the entire charging process.  What these circuits do to measure this is to look at the internal resistance of the battery, which changes as the battery charges.  Batteries with little or no charge have a lower resistance, while those that are closer to fully charged have a higher internal resistance.  But temperature changes this internal resistance as well, which is why cold batteries charge at a slower rate.  That is why a cold battery does not charge as well or as quick, because it’s internal resistance is higher.  To a charging circuit, a cold battery appears to have a higher charge than it actually does.  In this situation the battery will not be fully charged.  It will often be of the correct voltage, but the current capacity will be greatly diminished.  Batteries that are hot when charged will often suffer damage because the charging circuit is fooled into thinking that a batteries charge is much lower, and it will dump more current into the battery, which cause the chemical inside to degrade at a much faster rate than normal.  This will often leave a rechargeable battery in a state where the voltage looks good, but it’s ability to supply current is drastically diminished.

But there’s another issue with rechargeable batteries, mostly seen with NiCad batteries and that is charge memory.  With rechargeable batteries, if they are not properly used and recharged, they will develop what is often called charge memory, or they will actually begin to consume themselves.  Charge memory happens when a battery is used and barely drained of it’s total current capacity, and then is put back on the charger.  Because of how the chemical reaction works, the battery begins to experience a reduced capacity as the fully discharged point move higher and higher, closer to the full charge level.  In other words, since it was only discharged a quarter of the way before it was charged, it begins to see that as the bottom of it’s capacity.

With some of the Lithium Ion batteries there is another issue, which is that when they are fully discharged the battery begins to consume itself chemically.  In essence, it begins to eat itself, thus reducing it’s current capacity.

Now in all of this there arises another issue and that’s the discharge curve.  Discharge curves are a visual representation showing the voltage level of a battery over the discharge process. Lead acid batteries have a slow decline throughout the majority of the discharge process with little drop off (or knee of the curve) towards the end.  Lithium Ion batteries on the other hand (and are what’s in most devices such as camcorders, etc.) hold their voltage level for a long time and then suddenly drop off.  This dramatic drop in voltage can lead to the impression that the battery went from fully charged to suddenly being drained when that is not the case.  In fact it’s normal, but for those who are unaware of this, it can look as those an external influence, such as a ‘spirit’ was draining the battery.  mpoweruk.com has an excellent article discussing both temperature and discharge curves.  I highly suggest it to anyone who thinks battery drain is a good piece of evidence for proving the paranormal.

This is a theory that I’ve seen used by paranormal investigators, and one that seems to show how little investigators understand about batteries.  Many investigators will claim that ‘spirits’ have drained the electrical charge from their batteries in order to come up with the energy to manifest into something that can interact in our reality.  In an attempt to validate that theory they will often point out the fact that the battery was new, or had just been fully charged.  What they fail to see and often don’t know or understand is that batteries are not like liquid fuel in the respect as to being able to easily see how much fuel, or in this case charge is in the tank (battery).  They are also appear unaware of the laws of current and it’s effects, which dictate certain physical aspects about what should happen if that much current was drawn from a battery, as well as ignoring other issues about the environment that don’t make sense.

Before we get into the details about batteries, let’s look at a few of the latter points I stated, starting with current draw.  Any time an electron moves through a conductor it creates friction.  Friction that creates heat.  The greater the current draw the greater the heat generated.  In the case where a ‘spirit’ is reported to have drained a battery in minutes, the amount of heat generated would be substantial and the battery in question would get very hot.  But this is not reported in these incidents.

Now another thing that seems to go against this theory is how the ‘spirit’ only seems to target certain batteries and not others.  This is one of the biggest holes in the theory as far as I see.  Why would a ‘spirit’ drain one battery and not another, especially if it had completely drained the first source.  To me, that should make investigators take notice since if the ‘spirit’ is consuming power, why not drain every source available, and if the location has power to it then why not simply drain power from that source, which is very large in comparison, and go after such a weak power source.  The logic doesn’t add up no matter how you slice it.

Next topic installment: battery science.

For many of years that I have investigated, I had never really thought about this question because I thought it was obvious that I was collecting evidence of the paranormal. After all, we were getting EVPs, weird anomalies in pictures that were taken at “haunted”; locations, and we had some personal experiences to boot. What more could anyone ask for? Well that all changed after a skeptic mercisly shot down every piece of evidence we had collected, and it didn’t happen immediately after that.

As with most groups, we were proud of our evidence and convinced there was no other conclusion to be had than it was evidence of the paranormal, therefore they must be paranormal and the skeptic is not being open minded.  Sad to say, but as the debate with the skeptic continued on and they put up factual argument after factual argument, we found ourselves on the losing side of the debate as we tried to support our argument with theories and paranormal dogma.

Then we came to this photo, which we were convinced was paranormal.  The skeptic was quick to note that it could be cigarette smoke, or simply fog. We of course fired back and produced a picture of

a man who had been killed not more than 50′ from where that picture was taken, and showed that the face was a very close resemblance to the man in our photo.  We also noted that the conditions were wrong for fog that night and that neither of us had been smoking at that time, as well as both of us having the feeling that someone was watching us.  He quickly reiterated his conclusion from earlier and stated that personal experiences weren’t evidence and what we had was coincidental evidence, nothing more.  Needless to say, we held our ground and maintained that the skeptic was being unreasonable and close minded.  The picture resembled the photo of the man too closely to be just coincidence.  At least that’s what we were convinced of until after our discussion with the skeptic.  Feeling somewhat indignant about what the skeptic had said our evidence, especially this photo, I once again sat down with the video and reviewed it for more proof that it was what we claimed.

But, instead of finding more supporting evidence, I found the most damning piece of evidence to support the skeptics conclusion.  You see in all our other viewings we never looked to see if it was possible that the investigator in the photo was in fact smoking.  After all, why should we.  He was sure he wasn’t, and was very sincere in convictions about that statement.  But there it was: the faint glow of the cherry of a cigarette.  Not believing what I was seeing, I searched further and further through the video, carefully watching the hand that was away from the camera when I found a clear frame that was illuminated by the flash of my still camera where it could be clearly seen that he did indeed have a lit cigarette in his hand.  Of course this was devastating and I then began to think, “Who am I fooling?”  Well the answer to that was easy; I was fooling myself.

I then found myself going over all our evidence again, except this time I started looking at it without bias and from both our viewpoint and the skeptics.  It was then that I began to realize that the skeptic was right.  We had nothing.

Of course this didn’t go over well with the rest of my group.  They were convinced we had real evidence of the paranormal, and some were even trying to argue that there must be some mistake and what looked like a cigarette must be something else, because that investigator would never lie.  Back and forth this argument went as well as other arguments I brought up about our other evidence, eventually leading up to an argument that splintered the group.

It was pretty disheartening after that.  Some of our group’s members were in denial of fact, members were arguing back and forth, and the cold, hard truth had left me dismayed, ready to throw in the towel when the skeptic who had started this all had stopped by for a visit.  He could clearly see I was not a happy camper and after inquiring about the problem and hearing my tale he simply asked the question, “Who are you trying to convince?”

Huh? I thought to myself, “Everyone.” I replied somewhat puzzled at his intentions with his question.

“Then you’re going to have to collect evidence that doesn’t just convince yourself that the paranormal exists. You’re going to have to collect evidence that isn’t fuzzy and open to broad interpretation.”

After that he and I had a very good conversation as we discussed what was wrong with the evidence we collected and how to collect better evidence, as well as how to be objective and dig into things to find the truth instead of claiming some anomalous picture or recording was evidence.  He also gave me one of the best pieces of wisdom and that is that in order to claim something is paranormal, one must first rule out all other possibilities of what it could be. In other words, to quote Sherlock Homes, “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.” and in order to do that you must know how the world around you works.

So, I ask all paranormal investigators who happen across this page, “Who are you trying to convince?”.  If it’s yourself then the methods that are currently being used should be fine.  But if you’re sincerely trying to find real proof, or if you’re trying to really advance paranormal investigation, then the first step is to learn as much physics as possible and learn how to dig for the truth of an event by applying that knowledge as well as unbiased critical thought.