Be Careful of Paranormal Elitism

August 17, 2006 by erw.

I ran across an interesting article the other day. It’s by Stephen Wagner, who writes for the paranormal section of about.com. His article titled “Top Paranormal Experts: A Call for Professionalism”. In it Stephen laments the “Top few paranormal experts” are ignored by TV and instead “TV executives prefer to dip into a pool of amateurs and novices in an attempt to give credibility to their TV shows”. The article goes on to say “in the last five or so years, primarily as a result of enormously popular TV programming of the late 1980s and ’90s, hundreds upon hundreds of new self-proclaimed paranormal researchers and investigators have appeared, flooding the world of the paranormal. Ironically enough, if it were not for the ‘real experts,’ previously mentioned, and the extraordinary research they had conducted, the majority of these recent novices and wannabes would have never been inspired to follow in their footsteps.”

While I agree that people like Loyd Auerbach and another of my other favorite authors Brad Steiger are really the godfathers of modern paranormal research and thinking, I am concerned with some of the implications of his article. It almost implies that if you’re not one of the chosen few or trained in a specific fashion, you’ve got no business being involved in (or profiting from) the paranormal experience. Why this attitude? I think everyone should be interested in the secrets of the universe! While we’re not all qualified to fly a plane or manage power for a nuclear reactor, the paranormal world is an integral part of the human experience. Also, it’s important to note that deciphering just one of these mysteries could change the direction of mankind forever. Trying to exclude certain groups of people from research because they haven’t had the same experience (or possibly education) as some of the more senior personalities is ridiculous. So as long as people act with integrity and take the proper precautions, there are should be no exclusiveness to this club. Everyone that’s interested in ghosts benefits from the entertainment provided by Ghost Hunters and Most Haunted. After all most TV shows are for entertainment and not educational purposes. When these sort of shows stir interests, more books get written, more classes are taken, and more research is conducted.

Let’s be careful with promoting any sort of elitism in this field. More minds, more eyes, and more shows can go a long way to legitimizing what so many have been struggling to bring to the forefront for so long…

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