Saturday, 17 December 2011

REPORTS AND BELIEF IN THE PARANORMAL ON THE INCREASE

It seemed a routine matter when Surrey police received calls from motorists that a car had veered off the A3 with its headlights blazing on a cold, dark winters evening. But when officers went to investigate, they found no sign of the vehicle. A further search was ordered, with chilling results...

Just 20 yards from the reported crash scene a wrecked car containing the skeleton of a man was found buried in twisted undergrowth. The car's lights were off - the battery had long since died - and the body was badly decomposed.

The driver's body had lain undiscovered for five months and motorists now believe what they saw was a ghostly apparition of the original crash.

There are countless stories of ghosts and hauntings, many, like this one officially recorded by the authorities. And yet, in the 21st century, when scientifically we are so advanced, there seems to be no concrete evidence to prove the existence of ghosts.

So why is it, that according to a survey (NOP Solutions), one in three people believe in ghosts and an astonishing one in six claim to have had a paranormal experience themselves?

In some areas even local authorities are quite blasé about their existence. On March 24, 1997 in Longdendale, the Peak District Mountain Rescue teams received three separate disturbing calls reporting an aircraft flying very low over the moors and crashing. A couple also reported hearing the crash and seeing an orange glow light up the sky.

The seven mountain rescue controllers immediately dispatched their teams, in the hopes of dragging survivors from the wreckage. For 15 hours, more than 140 people plus a RAF helicopter searched every inch of moorland.

Yet no trace was found of any aircraft. No one ever reported a missing plane. Whatever it was that the callers had seen and heard had simply vanished.

One explanation put forward is that witnesses may be seeing a 'replay' of a 1948 aircrash, in which an American B29 crashed on a routine flight killing all 13 crew.

The mountain rescue teams have been called out endless times to investigate - to find nothing. This has been going on for over 20 years and reports are so regular that police no longer pass on sightings of mystery lights unless they feel it is a genuine sighting of a red distress flare.

Police in Kent are also frequently inundated with false reports believed to be inspired by a haunting. Running from Maidstone towards Rochester, is the A229, a road locally known as Bluebell Hill. This stretch of road is notorious in the area. Numerous motorists have reported knocking over a girl standing in the road late at night, only to find when they get out of the car that she has vanished. Police investigations always fail to find a victim or any evidence of an accident.

The ghost of Bluebell Hill is said to be a young girl who died in 1965. There was a collision on Bluebell Hill involving four women. One of the women travelling in the car was killed instantly - it was the day before she was due to get married. Many scientific investigations have been conducted to explore the paranormal, but one of the largest investigations to date has been led by Dr Richard Wiseman, a psychologist of the paranormal at Hertfordshire University. The team of researchers, with an array of high tech electronic equipment, staked out Edinburgh Castle and invited over 200 members of the public to stand in vaults under the south bridge to see if they reported anything suspicious.

Previous investigations had convinced Dr Wiseman that ghostly encounters could be explained as a psychological phenomenon triggered by environmental factors. However, this experiment has left him puzzled.

44% of the volunteers had reported some type of unusual experience. Among these were temperature changes, burning, touching and pulling sensations, the sound of breathing and a sighting.

In the five vaults reputed to be haunted, 51% of people reported experiences, but only 35% did so in the other five.

Dr Wiseman Said: 'I'm closer to being a lot more curious. Had the public experiences been randomly distributed between the vaults then you really couldn't conclude anything, what you can conclude is that there is something going on in some sense, that these vaults are in some senses producing an experience.'

Source: Daily Mail

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