Paranormal research; a fantasy view

You know what’s wrong with the field of paranormal investigations? In the real world, I mean, not in Falling (where I humbly think it’s exactly as it should be, but being the author I enjoyed the singular luxury of creating the world to be exactly how I wanted).

First of all, it’s a tiny – and not very well regarded – field quite separate from mainstream science. Unlike in Falling, you can’t really find parapsychology researchers in Australian universities, and even in much bigger institutions overseas they’re usually very small offshoots from more traditional scientific departments.

Even then, anything you need to know about modern paranormal research is in the name. Parapsychology is related to psychology, the study of the mind – the inference being that ghosts and hauntings can be explained as something we merely see with our minds, be it a vivid imagination or a hallucination borne from a mental illness.

It also isn’t helped by the fact that the term was suggested in the late 1890s to replace the original name for studying paranormal phenomena, psychical research. Investigations into ghosts were presided over by spirit mediums going into trances and dribbling ectoplasm out of their noses, not scientists setting up thermometers and condensers.

Nowadays, anyone trying to look into the existence of manifestations of the paranormal using machinery and the scientific method are usually one of two types.

The first are teams put together for TV shows, and when the nature of TV is action and drama, you can’t really trust their findings – like an eclipse or a thunderstorm, hauntings don’t work according to the schedules or needs of TV production companies.

The second are hobbyist parapsychological associations. In Australia, where Falling is set, there’s one that’s well resourced enough to hold a convention every year, but these things are still pretty fringe (it’s not held in a major city convention hall but a local community centre, which gives you an idea of its size and influence).

And while I don’t mean that as a diss of the Australian Parapsychology Research Association, their remit is pretty broad and includes scrutiny about stuff like out of body experiences, bending spoons and the like.

Even the much bigger Parapsychological Association based in the US, by its own admission, is more concerned with telepathy, clairvoyance and remote viewing than measuring the physical effects of a haunting.

Now, I’m in no position to dictate what the study of paranormal phenomena should consist of. If it deserves to include serious discussion about contacting spirits at a seance or visiting past lives, I’ll leave those parameters to the experts.

But my inspiration for what paranormal investigation should be came (somewhat unconsciously) from an unlikely source, a 1984 comedy movie.

An article by a film critic I once read articulated something I’d always been vaguely aware of in Ghostbusters, but it galvanised my love of it even more, and – again somewhat unconsciously – informed on the way I depicted supernatural enquiry in Falling.

With the proton beams, ghost traps and containment grid in the basement of their famous Moore St firehouse, the guys used tools and machinery to measure, assess, fight and trap ghosts. They didn’t sit around lighting candles and painting pentagrams. They weren’t psychic.

As writers Harold Ramis and Dan Aykroyd and director Ivan Reitman famously envisioned, they were more like pest controllers, everyday schmoes who just happened to know how to use the tools of the trade.

Donald, Tim and the rest of the professional scientists in Falling do the same, albeit with fewer wisecracks and with more real-world tools. The sole instrument in the story’s arsenal that’s pure sci-fi is the tool Tim calls Penny, a megaphone-shaped device that collects electromagnetic emissions from a source and displays analysis and results on the LCD screen at the operator end.

Even MARV – the research van Donald’s university employer maintains – captures electromagnetic, visual and atmospheric data for countless other applications outside hunting ghosts.

Other than that you’ll read about voltmeters, cameras, microphones and motion sensors, all a bit more developed in 2037 but which scientists have and use even today.

In fact there are several points in the story that take pains to explain how I consider psychic phenomena a different area altogether. When a minor character raises it with Tim he’s careful to assure the man help is available if that’s what he wants, but that Tim isn’t the expert to provide it.

In the universe of Falling (and I wish it applied to ours), well resourced researchers who’ve been to university for a long time and don’t go to get their tea leaves read or their fortune told apply the same discipline and rigour to ghosts and monsters their peers do to quantum computing, the Higgs boson or the atmospheres of exoplanets.