As the years go by I find myself stumbling on more and more paranormal reality shows while surfing the boob-tube for something entertaining to watch. Yeah I said boob-tube. I’m old. Anyhow, you’d think with literally hundreds if not thousands of channels to choose from on any given television service we’d be able to find enjoyable content, but my wife and I settle on a very few regular TV shows which include Maine Cabin Masters, Chopped, Restaurant Impossible, Forensic Files and reruns of NCIS [Paid Links].
When I’m watching by myself I may start with some paranormal show, just because I have to stay in the loop, but inevitably I end up watching a movie or binging a series on Netflix, or going back to movies or reruns of shows from my private collection.
It seems that television has very little to offer these days, that is if you’re looking for something relatively rewarding. We no longer have thirteen channels of crap, but more than one-thousand. The minimum “plan” when I signed up for Dish Network was something like 200. Truthfully I watch from a selection of about eight regular channels during the week. If you’re looking for a bunch of nonsense designed to sell advertising and products you won’t be disappointed.
And it’s not cheap. Look, back when TV was free, over-the-air broadcasting we got commercials because the networks needed some way of making money on the shows they produced. That’s an easy model to comprehend. Then Cable TV came along and those who wanted free movies and other content could pay to get it. That was the heyday of MTV, HBO, Showtime and all of that stuff. Now we pay for cable or satellite TV, AND WE GET MORE ADS THAN BEFORE! But I digress. This isn’t about my disdain for big corporations raping America. It’s about Paranormal TV.
Let’s talk some real bunk. Take shows like Paranormal Caught on Camera or Ghost Adventures for example. They make stuff up. Really and truly. They straight up bullshit you. It’s a show with an audience, and they need to get ratings to sell ads. PERIOD.
It should be clear to anyone watching that the “phenomena” presented on these shows really are only one of two things: convenient occurrences, like sounds or visual effects, that lend themselves to an interpretation of paranormal activity (which should not be the first conclusion), or blatant deception. There I said it. That these shows still thrive can only mean one thing: the audience is gullible.
Paranormal Caught on Camera presents surveillance videos or cellphone clips of alleged paranormal activity with commentary by select celebrities in the field. Each and every time we are presented with events that can be explained, somehow, if you actually wanted to take time to think about it. There is actually nothing out of the ordinary happening. These videos are the result of clever object manipulation, clever costumes and camera angles. The videos are completely falsely described and faked.
It doesn’t take much to slide a chair across the floor without touching it, or close a door, or have objects slide off of shelves or launch from tables. These things are easily done with strings, wires, fishing line, or someone just out of sight physically pushing the object.
Creative people exist in this world, and are completely capable of creating videos of weird creatures and unexplained phenomena.
In a recent clip a jinn was allegedly terrorizing a man as he walked through an abandoned house. One scene clearly shows a door leaning haphazardly against the other side of a door jamb opposite the camera as the person pans the room. He begins to enter another room to the right, where a door is clearly hanging on hinges. Suddenly a loud noise startles the guy and the camera shakes mercilessly, obscuring everything, until it finally returns to the previous doorway, where we see the door that had just been leaning is now falling to the floor.
The announcer states that a door was forcibly torn from the hinges and thrown to the floor. This is a complete lie. It’s clear that the door could easily have been pushed by someone standing on the other side of that wall but the celebrity commentators ignore this and instead agree that something supernatural is going on.
Another example from Paranormal Caught on Camera is a video which clearly shows a cloud formation in which a particular lenticular cloud, known as a pileus, forms above cumulus cloud and in this case is “pierced” by the cumulus, which then rises through and above the pileus. See this Wikipedia article for more information. This is a cool and completely explainable natural phenomenon, but the hosts jump right to the conclusion that it must be an alien spaceship obscuring itself in the clouds.
Why do I care? Because entertainment is entertainment, but lies are lies. These shows display no disclaimer stating that these are likely phony, hoaxed events they are going to show you. They present them as real.
The problem with this kind of TV is that it doesn’t educate, it just bamboozles. Hey, whatever sells ads right? It would be better to see shows like this explain how the events could be, and in fact are, faked.
With facts readily at hand anywhere online why do people fall for such nonsense? Maybe they don’t. Maybe they just need something stupid to watch that supports their belief in the paranormal.