Looking for Skeptics

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Wasn't the thread called 'I can see pictures of demons' and the member was called punshhh or something?

Maybe I'm thinking of the wrong one.

ETA: Sorry I may have the wrong one; Fairies in my photograph this is what I found.

Thanks for the link. I missed that train wreck of a thread, so I'm delving into it. The first picture linked reminds me of the photo from the Footer who taught us that Bigfeet eat canned beans. Might also have been the Footer who thought they existed in another dimension.

I love the JREF.
 
His listening to the files will yield NO information. I hope he didn't waste his money on speakers that he (apparently) didn't need.

The only real way to test if the files have be altered is to use audio analysis tools. Simply listening is too crude a test. Plus it involves someone making a judgement about something that is - in your latest claim as opposed to earlier claims -hard to heard and takes repeated trials.

This is, flaccon, just one more exercise in distraction, delay and dissemble. You have been provided numerous tests that have the potential to offer insight into this matter. After all this time, that you refuse to engage in such tests tells me far more than all diversions you have tried.

It happened Biscuit. The pre recorded file did change, and the voice is one single voice. Alderbank had trouble hearing files because its all so jumbly, too many voices, and its a strange noise that requires intense listening.

Not this time, tonight's test was well worth trying. I am away for a few days, so I hope you all have a great weekend.
 
It happened Biscuit. The pre recorded file did change, and the voice is one single voice. Alderbank had trouble hearing files because its all so jumbly, too many voices, and its a strange noise that requires intense listening.
Not this time, tonight's test was well worth trying. I am away for a few days, so I hope you all have a great weekend.


flaccon,
Don't do that. Don't add the "because" part. Alderbank didn't hear what you heard. You don't know why; please don't insert reasons that correspond to what you want to believe, but have no basis in what is observed.
 
It happened Biscuit. The pre recorded file did change, and the voice is one single voice. Alderbank had trouble hearing files because its all so jumbly, too many voices, and its a strange noise that requires intense listening.

Not this time, tonight's test was well worth trying. I am away for a few days, so I hope you all have a great weekend.

Hey guys I just recorded the voice of my dead father for you all to hear. Off for the weekend, ta!

:rolleyes::confused:

So now you have recorded a silent wav file compressed it and sent it via email. The recipient opened it, resaved it, re-compressed it, emailed it back to you, you opened it and now dead people voices but you won't share?
 
Did you hear anything when you listened to the white noise online? The white noise that's available at the site I posted is already a recording, so there shouldn't be a need to record anything again.

If that doesn't work for you, you can download and play samples of white, pink, brown, blue, violet, or gray noise at this site:

Download Noise Test Tones Here

All of these varieties of noise are used to test sound systems. At the bottom of each page, there's a box titled If you are interested... In that box there's a download link to a free 15 minute sample of each type of noise. They also sell CDs but I don't see any need for you to buy one---the free 15 minute samples ought to do nicely. I gave you the first link because I didn't want you to have to download anything unless it was necessary.

You can generate these on Audacity. I've explained to flaccon how.
 
Are these from flaccon? What's the story here?


(There are a lot of people posting and I am a bit confused)

Upthread it was asked whether it's possible to get audio artefacts from complete silence, just through encoding. Using 2 different audio programs I've done just that, starting by generating silence, exporting it, normalising it, exporting it, normalising it again, and exporting it again.
 
I'm content to let this thread sleep for a few days. If the questions pile up, flaccon will never be able to answer them all when she gets back anyway.

Ward
 
You can generate these on Audacity. I've explained to flaccon how.

I was trying to make it easier for her, since she doesn't seem to understand technology very well. It's easier to download a pre-prepared file than it is to make your own in Audacity. I saw you trying to explain it to her repeatedly and I felt your pain :o
 
Going through that old thread...

http://web.archive.org/web/20011216033423/http://home.talkcity.com/commercest/lyndalequesenberry/

flaccon, you should take a look as well.


Thank you for taking the time to dig that up. It's truly a shame that the original thread is no more, as it was one for the history books. Still, between the remnants of his site and his later reappearance as LightPiercingDarkness (which I had forgotten about), we can still get a good sense of what he was like. Ah, memories. (And yet another reminder of how old I'm getting, grumble grumble.)
 
That's not so. I tried a recording on a friends Samsung laptop, using my speakers, and the recording was totally silent other than a small speaker hiss.

If no one sends me a silent recording, I will have one by tonight, and look into it later.

If I was to press play on a transferred file, and the spirits could manipulate that file, then I could send it back to the sender, altered.

I managed to ask a friend to send me 2 silent recordings. Playback revealed one voice. The Priests name is heard on one, and a sentence on the other. I sent him the files back to see if they had altered, he won't find out until he purchases speakers tomorrow.

It happened Biscuit. The pre recorded file did change, and the voice is one single voice. Alderbank had trouble hearing files because its all so jumbly, too many voices, and its a strange noise that requires intense listening.

Not this time, tonight's test was well worth trying. I am away for a few days, so I hope you all have a great weekend.

Well, this is a testable claim. If the spirits are changing the contents of a file, that is detectable without having to listen to it. You can take a copy of the file, before playing it back, and do a direct comparison or compare checksums afterwards to see if there is any difference.

If there isn't any difference, but you can hear something you couldn't hear before, then that is simply more evidence in support of pareidolia being the explanation. Once your brain cottons on to an interpretation of what it's hearing, it's very difficult to shake it, which matches what you are describing. It seems so obvious, you can't believe that you didn't hear the words the first time you listened.
 
Well, this is a testable claim. If the spirits are changing the contents of a file, that is detectable without having to listen to it. You can take a copy of the file, before playing it back, and do a direct comparison or compare checksums afterwards to see if there is any difference.

If there isn't any difference, but you can hear something you couldn't hear before, then that is simply more evidence in support of pareidolia being the explanation.

Yes. However, flaccon will jut shrug it off by returning to the original (?) claim that the sounds are manipulated on the way to the speakers. It's all so predictable it's sad.
 
Yes. However, flaccon will jut shrug it off by returning to the original (?) claim that the sounds are manipulated on the way to the speakers. It's all so predictable it's sad.

But apparently spirits have something against high quality headphones, so the ways of the spirit world remain opaque to use mere meat sacks!
 
But apparently spirits have something against high quality headphones, so the ways of the spirit world remain opaque to use mere meat sacks!

Yeah, it's extremely interesting that at the moment one tries to help the spirits communicate more clearly they go silent. I bet they could get their message across in a crowded terminal without issues! :rolleyes:
 
But apparently spirits have something against high quality headphones, so the ways of the spirit world remain opaque to use mere meat sacks!

Yes. I got the same answer: No! Don't use high quality headphones! Use cheapo speakers. Oh, and turn the volume up and hold them up to your ears. Better yet, play the sound over the phone. The more noise, the better.

I wonder why that is.
 
Thank you. (documented, Bishop, Priest, GP, Police, Hospital.)

sigh :confused:

This is not informative. From this cryptic note I have to conclude that all you mean when you say you have "documented" your earlier experiences (the ones you are so absolutely certain really occurred) is that you have told these different authority figures your story.

If that's what you do mean, then you have nothing. As I've tried to explain, perceptions and memories are extremely malleable, suggestible things, and simply recounting what you interpreted as events does not make reliable documentation.

So we are back to your prior beliefs being manifested in your unreliable interpretations of suggestive situations or "events" (such as noises etc.) Please know that all of us are unreliable witnesses, as I've tried to explain. None of us can rely on our sensory perceptions and interpretations alone. Even groups of people can and do experience shared delusions/misinterpretations of events.

The story you recount above on this page of the thread about how it all began, with your belief that someone entered the house and went upstairs, while it seems so sound to you, could easily be a series of misinterpretations of what occurred, coloured and "explained" by your assumptions and easy acceptance that supernatural events are possible.

At so far a remove it's now impossible to investigate, but if you will allow me a thought experiment:

You were expecting your husband soon, so a sound in your hall or even outside your front door would unconsciously immediately associate with that expectation of an arrival in the house. You don't mention whether you had a family pet at the time, but a dog in the house could easily account for all the things you describe. It's easy to forget to turn a light off upstairs and later discover it is on and wonder who turned it on. Things like that happen all the time. Having started to believe uncanny things had happened, your heightened alertness would do the equivalent of pareidolia and feed in confirmations to your developing narrative from any number of subliminal perceptions of indistinct sensory glimpses. The final departure event you used as a way to clear your fear. Again, a dog running down your stairs would be a trigger for you to add the wished for event of the departure.

You may say you had no dog (we don't have enough information to really deal with this, so this is all by way of an example to help you understand that your interpretations might have been too neat, too swift, not necessarily correct). Did you have a cat flap? Cats are always prowling into other people's houses, looking for food and adventure. Was it windy on both the nights (the arrival and the departure)? Old houses creak and shift... wood expands and contracts as humidity and temperatures change.

Etc. Jumping to the thrill of a supernatural event (and fear is a kind of thrill) is too easy to do, especially if you are predisposed to believe it possible, as you really seem to be (and seem to want it to be, which is even more telling).

So again: you have no actual valid documentation of events you are convinced were real.

You may feel a bit confused by the number of people throwing questions and suggestions at you in this thread, especially as you don't really seem to want to seriously establish whether these spirits actually exist, through the protocols that were being worked on early in this thread. You just keep floundering with "tests" that are not really tests at all, but just more playing around with pareidolia.

It's getting boring.

I would suggest that you really knuckle down and work with one or two people from this forum to seriously address the first issue: do they exist at all? Alderbank and one or two others who were drawing up good protocols early on ought to be the contact points. You guys work it out, and report back to the rest of us.

The information and communication from you has been so incomplete, so randomly focussed (for instance your sudden unexplained reference to special fingers dropped in after so many pages, or your uninformative response [quoted above at the start of this post] to my earlier discussion about documentation), that this thread is becoming an unwieldy clamour of confusion and backtracking.

I have no more to offer, so I'm going to let others more experienced and competent than I do the work with you to test the reality of the spirits' existence (note the correct use of apostrophe just there, by the way... to tap into a vein of humour that was gently humanising this thread earlier on ;)). Perhaps we can organise a small committee of representatives of the skeptic position to interact with you, so they can coordinate questions and answers with you. The rest of us could communicate thoughts, ideas etc to them via private messages, and they could be the sole point of interaction you would need to deal with.

I think it would help to settle flaccon to a more productive focus of attention.

What do people think?
 
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What do people think?
I think that nothing yet suggests that flaccon will ever seriously consider non-supernatural explanations of her experiences.

I think that until she does she will never agree to an objective test that excludes pareidolia as the explanation of the perceived voices, and that as a result we are not going to be able to help her any further.

I think we should all stop posting on this thread until flaccon can bring herself to acknowledge the possibility that the spirits aren't real, and commits to such a test in order to find out.
 
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