A Paranormal convention. This was something that wasn’t even on my radar six months ago, and here I was a vender at one. I honestly don’t know what to expect, so I guess then it’s hard to be disappointed. This convention took place on the aircraft carrier Hornet, in Alameda, California. Originally commissioned in 1943, the Hornet served from WWII through the Apollo program, and was decommissioned in 1970. This ship saw a lot of action and is famous for being haunted.
I had never been there before, so I didn’t know what to expect. I really didn’t have much time to indulge my interest in the ship itself, so I’m going to have to go back there sometime when I have the time to look everything over and go on the tours. I had first heard about the convention through a couple I had met through my MeetUp group on reincarnation. They had worked on the ship, and so I was able to hang with them and other docents at meal times, got a little peak behind-the-scenes and some of the inside dope on some of what goes on there.
The convention started with the usual stuff, vender tables and presenters giving talks for about two hours, then dinner, and then we were all divided up into “investigation” teams, each with a couple of guides, that toured the ship’s hot spots. After these tours were finished, about 1:30 am, people were free to wander the open areas until 3. I quit at the end of the tour. I was really tired and had seen enough.
During vender time, I set up a table for my services and immediately started learning. The first thing I noticed, is that everybody else had a banner that they hung from the front of there table. I didn’t. Next time I’m going to have to look into that. The other thing I got, was that almost nobody seemed to understand what I was all about. I suppose that I assumed that people really into ghost hunting and the paranormal would, at least, know about releasing spirits and de-possession, but apparently not. Or they only were acquainted with it in a peripheral sort of way, it really didn’t have anything to do with what they were interested in. In fact, the whole concept of de-haunting might actually piss them off a bit, I mean, they’re into investigation, if we clean out the haunted places they’ll have nothing to do.
It seemed like a lot of the conventioneers were from various investigation groups. Now that I think of it, I should have spent more time talking to the different groups and finding out what they did. What little it did pick up showed me that there are many different approaches and goals for these groups. Who knew that there were so many? There was also a group with t-shirt messages I won’t repeat here; Any convention attracts all kinds, I suppose.
I haven’t watched too many ghost shows. I have seen some, but they didn’t prepare me for what I ran into at this con. I really hadn’t realized how much the paranormal world was divided into Sensitives and Techs. (I made up these names, but the division is quite real.) The TV shows I’ve seen give short-shift to the sensitives. (Probably because there’s not much to see there.) There is also a third category, the pure scientist, who is less interested in ghost hunting, per se, and is focused on parapsychology and the science behind the whole phenomenon. I only saw one person in this last group, who I’d already seen at HCH Institute, where he teaches classes. The Sensitives tend to focus on developing their intuition, and so don’t pay much attention to the tech, and the Techs seem to pay little attention to their senses, so the groups seem to have an uneasy partnership, each not really sure what to make of the other.
It seems logical that there should be crossovers, intuitives that also know their tech, but I didn’t meet any. One of the presenters was a fellow that apparently has created and built most of the devices that are out there now. He makes his living selling these devices and doesn’t really have anything to say about whether ghosts exist or not. He just builds stuff that people like and looks good on TV shows. At least, that’s what he says.
For me, this raises a question. I’m capable of building whatever hardware might interest me, but I’m also an intuitive. I find it easier and more interesting to depend on my senses than to depend on a bunch of cranky and clumsy devices to detect and communicate. On the other hand, tech is completely objective and creates a record, so there is that to consider. But, what would happen if the engineers and intuitives got together and built devices that detected what the intuitives felt? I have read up on the tech, to some extent, and it seems that most of it is based on the idea of looking at random signals or input and looking for non-randomness, that is then translated into output. Presumably, the spirits are able to influence the random signals in order to communicate. What if you, instead, searched for things that are sensitive to psychic energy in the same way that other instruments are sensitive to light, heat, x-rays, ultra-violet light and other forms of radiation?
One of these days I’m going to have to seriously sit down and consider this whole idea. It seems to me that all the people building tech are not sensitive, so they have no way to reality-check their ideas. It’s like blind people trying to design and build a camera. How do you develop the science and technology of optics for lenses, for example, if you can’t see? My theory is, that any device or detector that you can buy, has already been de-sensitized to the paranormal as much as possible. Because these influences are pretty much everywhere, all the time, it’s just that most people don’t notice them, except when they’re unusually strong, or they’re unusually open to it.
My idea, if anyone wants to fund it, is to investigate sensors and circuits and devices of all kinds that are generally avoided because they “don’t work right,” or exhibit, seemingly, random behavior at times, to see if any of them react to the paranormal things that I can sense. It’s like when scientists that stumbled across x-rays, and had to figure out how to image and control this new form of energy that nobody had ever seen before. I’m sure that there are methods of objectively detecting paranormal “energies,” for lack of a better tern, but these methods have all been discarded by technologists because they appear to be unstable and unreliable by people who didn’t recognize what they are actually responding to. If anyone wants to fund this, let me know. ;)
Paracon: To be continued. There’s lots more to talk about.
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