Terms

As noted in the former version of this blog, we will be taking on specific terms in order to label and organize the stories we bring you. The idea is to develop a very specific and fairly rigid system of tagging that allows readers to use the blog as much for actual research as just fun to read.

We take the paranormal and related concepts very seriously. Sure, some of it is obvious fakery, others are far more clever and complex hoaxes, but a good portion of what is often termed The Unknown is, in fact, inexplicable.

However, UFO reports do not - so far as we know now - have anything to do with accounts of ghosts, for example. Even if we find out later on down the road that the two are somehow related, almost no one experiences them in the same context. While both encounters may cause the viewer fear, he's obviously going to come away from the UFO encounter with a completely different experience than he would a ghostly one and most people who have these encounters experience a lot of the same circumstances and happenings. We'd tag one UFO and the other Supernatural, instead of tagging them both Unknown, for example.

Obviously, there is going to be some crossover from time to time. Psychic phenomena best illustrates this: purists make a separation between telekinesis and psychokinesis. The former being the ability to commune with spirits and have them move objects for you; psychokinesis is the ability to move objects through the sheer force of one's will or mental energy. Of course, all of this is theoretical, so we have no real way of knowing how such things are done unless the person doing it informs us ("I talk to a male voice and it moves things for me"), so the system will take shape over the course of time spent here, and all suggestions are welcome.

It also has to do with popular usage, known terms, and so on. There is an obscure paranormal phrase I like to use to describe recurring hauntings, veridical imagery or afterimage. I did not create it, but I like the way it sounds, and I think it's power lies in its specificity. Recurring "event" hauntings are well-documented and specialists overwhelmingly tend to agree that they are probably caused by the strength of the emotions that were experienced at the time the event happened - that these emotions somehow "burned" their way into the atmosphere in that area and they surface at a specific time and replay like a recorded image. In general, specialists do not necessarily think that the images involved are actual "spirits" in the way we popularly perceive them - intelligent, animate spirits who can make choices and interact with the living - instead, they are simply recorded images of spirits. That's why I like the phrase; it's specificity communicates this exact concept. But since it is so obscure, I'm not sure if using it would be prudent.

The thing about these event hauntings is that Eastern spirituality suggests that those who take their own lives are doomed to repeat the event eternally. Kind of makes you wonder if those spirits are just hollow, imagistic impressions in the atmosphere, or The Damned, themselves...

At any event, we'll discuss more about tags and how to use them, as well as which tags we're employing and how, as we go along.