Good question. And interesting response.
There's this parapsychologist by the name of Dr. Barry Taff, who has come to some interesting conclusions as to what "ghosts" and "hauntings" really are. He's been doing paranormal research for over 40 years and among other pretty famous hauntings, was one of the main investigators in The Entity case. Basically he says that ghosts, in the way that most people think of them, don't exist. His belief is that hauntings(objects moving by unseen hands, etc) are most likely a result of telekinesis(with other factors at play), and not as a result of the spirits of people who have died, doing things. He definitely claimed to have seen things move by themselves, etc, but once again, attributes them to manifestations of the human subconscious, and not by a deceased person's spirit.
Brent L. Smith-Realitysandwich.com
It’s been a long time since ‘The Entity’, a film that continues terrifying its audience. Do you think the remake can have the same effect, or are its aims completely different?
I personally didn’t like the film. The director rewrote a lot of it, and it was lambasted in the press. I remember Barbara Hershey pleaded with the production company to be in the movie, as did Ron Silver, but they hated it after it was torn apart in the media. If [the remake] was made today, and was the same thing as it was then, it might be a little hokey. But if it’s more serious and follows what really transpired, it could be more frightening. A lot of it simply depends on who’s writing, directing, and acting in it.
In the field, you’ve witnessed objects, even people, being tossed across rooms by unseen forces. If restless dead people aren’t the culprit, what then is at work here?
I don’t, for one second, believe this is the work of dead people throwing living people around. The evidence and collected data suggests these effects are the result of what’s called Recurrent Spontaneous Psychokinesis (RSPK).
There’s two types of psychokinesis (moving physical objects around without physical means). There’s microscopic, which works on very small scales, things like affecting random number generators, random event generators, and moving subatomic particles around. It’s usually electrostatic-based, fatigue in the individual is shown, as it’s done on a conscious level. And then there’s macroscopic, what we call ‘poltergeist,’ and that’s a whole different ball of wax. We’re talking about the ability of moving very massive objects, hundreds of pounds easily. It’s done on a subconscious level, as there is no fatigue seen in the person at the core of it. Like the microscopic type, it’s believed that the phenomena are generated by aliving human agency.
So, it’s our subconscious minds, then, that have the ability to hurl household objects around?
It’s more complicated than that. It seems to be that there are several overlapping variables at work. One is the location—either a geomagnetic or an electromagnetic anomaly site—where there’s some strong form of energy that we know of affecting the individual at the core of the phenomenon. The second variable is that the individual is usually seizure-prone or epileptic, sometimes without knowing it. Lastly, they also suffer from ineffective coping mechanisms and problems dealing with stress. If those three variables work in the right relationship with one another, you get phenomena.
The way the electromagnetic environment affects these people is stressful. It alters their body in some way. The mechanism is called ‘inductive resonance coupling’. So, even if you’re in the right environment and you’re seizure-prone or epileptic, if the field doesn’t resonate with yours…nothing happens. And that may be based more on your emotions than anything else. What’s also curious is that most seizure-prone or epileptic people are not poltergeist agents. It’s unilateral, not bilateral, and we don’t know what the missing variable is. This is why, with every case we approach, on top of everything else we do a medical background check of the individual and ask a lot of personal questions that, seemingly, have little to do with what’s going on.
If mainstream science pursued the understanding this phenomena, what kind of consequences would it have on the current paradigm?
My gut is telling me is that if we find out what this energy is, it could take us to the stars. This is energy that does work without heat! There’s only four forms of energy that we basically deal with: electromagnetism, strong and weak nuclear, and gravitational. Well, it can’t be gravitational because the mass is insufficient. It can’t be nuclear because the individual would be dead due to ionization long before any RSPK occurred. Is it electromagnetic? When you see a 215-pound man being picked up and thrown across a room, his clothing and everything else should burst into flame by the liberated heat of the force doing it. Second law of thermodynamics. But it doesn’t get hot, it gets cold! What are we being shown here? Call it Zero Point Energy, call it whatever you want, but whatever it is explains much, if not all, of the paranormal—from ESP all the way to OBE’s (out-of-body experiences) and NDE’s (near-death experiences). However, the way this energy couples to us is almost assuredly magnetic in nature. The problem is we can’t simulate these conditions and test it in a lab yet. For one, it would be very, very costly, and more importantly, it would also put the test subjects at risk—you might fry them.
A Wikipedia search for Remote Viewing tells us there is no credible scientific evidence that RV works, and that it failed to produce any useful intelligence information. What are your thoughts?
Well, I’m curious as to who wrote and posted the entry. Anyways, yes, there is an overwhelming amount of data, it’s been replicated thousands of times. We ran the research at UCLA long before there was work at SRI [Stanford Research Institute], and it ran until ’78 when the lab closed. After that, we went into offices in the Westwood area and ran it through 1987, and then everyone went in their own direction and that was that. It’s real. It’s demonstrable. It doesn’t work with everyone, if it did we would understand it. And even when it does work with a lot of people, we still don’t understand the mechanism. The reason our government didn’t do anything with remote viewing is because 1) they couldn’t weaponize it 2) they couldn’t profit from it and C) they were skeptical of it because we couldn’t explain the mechanism, even though it worked. So, if you can’t kill anybody with it, and if you can’t explain it, then either it’s useless or it must be the Devil.
What do you think we can we do to reintroduce science into the paranormal?
First of all, get rid of the crap on television. One of the biggest negative factors dealing with this subject matter is, basically, all of these paranormal reality shows being fraudulent. In my opinion, they’ve set the field back at least three quarters of a century. The shows are all fake, everyone knows that. A lot of people don’t even care. There isn’t a legitimate paranormal reality show on TV because it can’t count on something happening, you have to make ithappen, and that means you’re faking it. But if you’re a producer, you’ve got to have a show, you can’t just have talking heads for forty-two minutes. It’s this kind of market that has attached a stigma to the paranormal. If you go into this field there’s a good chance, academically, you’ll never work. You won’t have a job. I can testify to that.
So your work in this field has alienated you from other professional endeavors? What sort of prejudice have you experienced?
For example, I do a lot of normal things, I have a company that develops a number of medical patents, not involving the paranormal. But since my name is in these [business] plans, potential investors have looked me up and instantly think I’m nuts because, well… “You’re doing all this crazy stuff.” See, if you’re already wealthy, or you’ve made a lot of money turning investments into big profits, then you’re “eccentric,” and they don’t care what you’re doing. But if you’re not financially lucrative, or successful doing anything with someone else’s money, then you’re “crazy.”
I confronted an investor about it recently. It was a big multinational electronics company, you’ve probably heard of them. They initially approved to develop three out of five of our patents. It went to the head of development, they thought our work was great, we’re given a green light. Okay, great. But then months go by, and we don’t hear from them. So, we send an inquiry. The head of the company gets back to us, and starts going off on how the patents are bullshit, the research is bullshit, and on and on. And we’re going, “What? Where did this come from?” So, I asked him, “Look, tell me the truth. Drop the bullshit, and just tell me the truth.” And after a long pause he says, “Okay, you want to know the truth? I looked you up and the minute I found out who are you and what you do, I threw it away. You’re crazy. No one’s giving you money, no one will ever give you money, they’ll think you’re crazy, and you are. End of story.” So, this has happened at least six to eight times that we know of, and it’s because of my background in parapsychology. Since then, we’ve changed a lot of our plans, omitted my name, we changed the name of the company, I don’t even know what it is anymore, nor do I want to know. I’m completely removed from it. So, getting into this professionally, you’ll eventually discover you can’t get a job. “Sorry, position’s already full.” That kind of thing. It’s looked at as a pseudoscience, it’s looked at as a fringe science. If you can’t make a lot of money with it, and if you can’t kill people with it, no one cares. It has no use in the western world. So that’s, y’know, where things are.
It’s interesting that hauntings could be more of a mental health issue than, say, a spiritual one. If people find themselves in a ‘haunted’ home, what can they do about it (short of running to their favorite television network)?
Well, first of all, the probability of something literally harming people is the chance of you getting hit with a meteorite in the next five minutes. It’s not going to happen. And since most people don’t even want to read what the real research has indicated, it’s a dead end. Until we get to the point where we understand the mechanism behind these things, nothing will ever change. This kind of phenomena has been around forever. Our ancestors believed this stuff was the result of dead people floating around. Now we know different. I have a little over 4,500 cases in my file, and I’d say more than 99% have been poltergeists. Very few, if any, have been what we call ‘hauntings,’ and even those are suspect. You go where the data takes you. If you can’t replicate something in a laboratory under controlled conditions, like we can with remote viewing, you’re basically left with noticing patterns—longitudinal patterns—in the data you collect. And it’s there. It’s kind of a joke almost. As I always emphasize: the places and faces may change, but the events do not. So you see the same thing, over and over, over and over. And you keep getting the same stories, the same measurements, the same readings, and the same answers to all the medical and psychological background questions. So the question becomes: How many times do you have to be hit in the head with this stuff before you realize, “Oh my god, this is amazing?!”
In terms of having an interest in this subject matter, I’ve gotten the most useful information attending your lectures. How often do you speak publicly?
Well, in the ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s I was lecturing a lot. But it’s very infrequently now. If I lecture a couple times a year, I’m amazed. The only thing I’ve done recently, funny enough, was film for a TV show, “Ghost Adventures: Aftershocks” on the Travel Channel.
So paranormal reality shows aren’t entirely off the table for you?
The only reason I agree to do certain shows is because they don’t ask me to lie about myself or the work. I’m not conducting any field research, but they are featuring a recent update from my Cielo Drive case in the Benedict Canyon area. We’ve got this incredible photo. The woman pictured was having a mini seizure, and directly next to her head is a strange, luminous anomaly that wasn’t seen by anyone present at the time. I think what we’re seeing here is the optical analog of what the energy is doing to her: the very potent geomagnetic field was literally cooking her brain, and she was convulsing because of it.
Wow, so that’ll be featured on ‘Ghost Adventures: Aftershocks’ on the Travel Channel?
Yes, it’s supposed to air in February.
How can people contact you if they’d like to host a lecture or just inquire?
They’re welcome to visit my site at barrytaff.net.