Syfy's 'Fact or Faked Paranormal Files' interview; do you believ

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Syfy's 'Fact or Faked Paranormal Files' interview; do you believ
Jul 14, 2010
By April MacIntyre
M&C

If you love "Ghost Hunters," "Paranormal State" or "Destination Truth," Syfy's latest reality show "Fact or Faked" will be your 'cuppa.
If you think all this stuff is hyped-up hooey served by "experts" with dubious credentials, you'll be looking for the latest "River Monsters" in a nanosecond.
Syfy's "Fact or Faked: Paranormal Files" is the latest reality series where six people with different skill sets pull a Tosh.0 and debunk or follow up on viral video on the Internet that makes paranormal claims.
The premiere, airing on Thursday, July 15, at 10 p.m., sees former FBI agent Ben Hansen who "assembled" a team of experts three years ago to investigate reports of paranormal activity. This statement in itself needs some major forensic fact digging.
Bill Murphy is the "lead scientist." Jael De Pardo is a "journalist" who worked on Syfy's "Destination Truth." Larry Caughlan is an "effects specialist" which means absolutely nothing in the real scientific world scheme of things and Chi-Lan Lieu proclaims she is a "TV Journalist."
The comely team of twenty-somethings all review video in their den-like office where they spit-ball what is like, TOTALLY fake versus what could pass the show's criteria: Believable witness, tangible proof and a compelling video.
In the episode Syfy provided for review, a Georgia police video that went viral shows a fleeing car that appears to have passed through a chain-link fence near "the haunted city" Savannah, Georgia, which has the team recreating the wild car chase that eluded the local cop.

Somewhere in a Georgia trailer, Cletus is having a laugh big-time telling that chestnut over and again.
The team enlist a stunt driver and try to figure out how Cletus's car got on the other side of a chain link fence without knocking it down.
The other team of Fact or Fakers is sent to Arizona to recreate some filmed elusive UFO-like lights. After the two groups finish their research, it's back to the den, where all six decide which story is real or bunk.
"Fact or Faked Paranormal Files" airs Thursday July 15th at 10/9c on Syfy

Fact or Faked Paranormal Files Thursday July 15th at 10/9c on Syfy
Executive Producer John Brenkus, Ben Hansen who is the team leader and former FBI agent and Bill Murphy who is the lead scientist and investigator on the show talked to Monsters and Critics about this series.
Monsters and Critics: This show boils down to the fact people believe or they don’t believe. They think there’s ghosts and similar to religion, some people believe in the life hereafter, other people think we are like a battery and we just wind down at the end of life. How are you going to present this show where it doesn’t turn off the people who think that this is just an ongoing junk science that’s a lot of hearsay and what if's?
John Brenkus: I think that in terms of presenting the show, I mean you’re right, people either believe or they don’t believe, that sort of - it’s kind of like people are either on one side of the fence or the other.
But I don’t know if that’s necessarily true. I think there are a lot of people who are willing to go either way, like they’re not sure. And this show really appeals to all the groups because we’re saying it could be real, it could be fake, might be somewhere in between.
And we want to go out and explore this and I think that when you see the tone and style of the show it doesn’t come across as anything other than a credible show that’s genuinely investigating these cases.
It could be absolutely fake, we’re happy to prove that, it could absolutely be something that we simply can’t explain. The tone of the show is what’s very important.
We feel that in terms of all the other paranormal shows that have preceded this, this is the one that kind of nails what the audience today thinks about the paranormal.
They’re curious and they’d love to know and for people who really believe, we’d like to show them some things you should believe and some things you shouldn’t.
And for people who don’t believe at all we should say here are the things that you’re correct about. But here are some others that we simply can’t explain.
M&C: Don’t you think though that a lot of people are more susceptible to the power of suggestion? Comic Paul Mooney made an interesting comment on Showtime's The Green Room, he said that white people have to stop believing in ghosts, that there aren’t any ghosts. And he said it jokingly, but he really wasn’t kidding. I just think that there’s a lot of truth to that. I think that people are looking for something and they want to believe it, they’re going to see it no matter what.
John Brenkus: I mean I think that that’s true in everything but - and I think when you see the show you know we certainly - there’s something paranormal and people are inclined to believe it we’re going to demonstrate whether or not they should believe it.
Whether it not is there, I mean I think that when you certainly see the way that we debunk cases there’s no way to walk away from it and then say yeah but I still believe it.
Because we really debunk it, we make sure that if we say look, this simply is not paranormal we prove it beyond the shadow of a doubt.
If we can’t explain it then it’s still up for debate then we don’t - we absolutely don’t say is paranormal we’re saying it could be, we simply can’t explain it.
And I think that what’s interesting is even the way of you know approaching, of saying that the audience is either you know going to be a believer or not a believer I think that when you see the way that the show’s presented I think that it’s tapping into the way - I think that people are going to project their beliefs on to it and have it backed up when we come across something that can’t be explained.
And if there’s somebody who is not a believer it’s going to be backed up when we debunk something.
Ben Hansen: Right - just adding on to that the premise of the show approaches it in allowing the audience to decide for themselves that those who might say that you know this might be junk science or whatever I just think they haven’t done their homework.
If you look at the official government studies you know that have been done on - the FBI did a study on cattle mutilations in the 70s, Project Blue Book was you know studying UFOs and was followed by other official organizations for several years.
You know the CIA and military were experimenting with remote healing. If everyone you know believed that anything that was categorized as paranormal is junk science, I don’t think our government would be taking a serious look at it.
Because what if it were true? You know what if these things that we’re seeing or phenomena is true? Well it could be manipulated, it could turn into a potential weapon.
It could be you know used in warfare or promoting new scientific discoveries. So I think people who have this kind of cursory interest in it really have not gotten into it if they believe that a large segment of the government and science doesn’t take this seriously.
They do. The problem is for those who are amateurs or don’t have the resources to study it in that way, I mean there’s the problem because the rest of us are just kind of left you know sifting through everything and not knowing what’s already been done.
Does that make sense?
M&C: Yeah it does, but you keep talking like the government is a scientific authority, but didn’t the government also - I mean the Men Who Stare at Goats, didn’t they put money behind that study? You can say it’s a science and have all these degrees but the real facts are always illusory. They’re always hearsay, they’re always someone’s perception, someone’s feelings - which are contagious to the susceptible - someone testifying saying 'I felt it, I know there was something there.'
Ben Hansen: Let me ask you another question. When you look at a criminal investigation and someone’s testifying in court, what is that evidence upon?
M&C: Well ideally the evidence is built upon actual physical evidence that’s found at the crime scene. Physical tangible quantifiable evidence.
John Brenkus: I think that what you’ll see especially in our show is we have criteria before we investigate anything. If we only have an eye witness we don’t investigate it.
We have three criteria. We have to have compelling footage that we believe could be authentic. We have to have tangible evidence.
Then we have to have a credible eye witness that we feel like is not some kook who’s just saying I was touched in a hallway.
It has to be a credible eye witness and third of all it has to be a case where we can actually test it. If it doesn’t reach those criteria then we don’t investigate it.
Because like you’re saying we don’t investigate the 'hey, I think this place is haunted, I felt the ghost touch me.' That doesn’t rise to the level of something that we investigate.
I think you’ll be - and especially when applying that criteria, I think that you like myself, I don’t want to watch a program that just seems frivolous, you know someone said they saw a UFO.
They have to have actual video of it, they have to be a credible witness themselves and we need to be able to test that video in some way, it can’t just be something that is not testable.
But that way when you meet those criteria you have a very satisfied audience.
Bill Murphy: I’d like to build upon that just for a moment. The show hasn’t given any sort of directive to any of the cast members that there is a specific agenda that we need to adhere to.
It’s a diverse cast and everybody has different skill sets. And when you put everybody in the same room then you send them out into the field, their specific knowledge, experience and background really come into play to see if there is a readily acceptable rational explanation.
I mean we kind of adhere to Occam’s razor if it’s possible the simplest explanation is the more likely explanation but it isn’t the only one that should be considered.
But we try that first. What is the simple straight forward explanation for this? Sometimes the explanation however is a little more complicated and involves several layers.
So when you have a diverse team that John Brenkus and Ben have assembled then it allows the multitude of expertise to kind of you know converge and study a particular video, comment about it quickly and if you’ve seen something similar and maybe you know how it occurred, then you know what maybe we’ll table that one for a while.
And we’ll look for one that sort of stumps the team and those are the ones that we act upon. So I like your line of questioning but you know I can say from my experience on the show there hasn’t been anybody saying hey, this is a case that we want to move on because you know we like the subject and we want the public to buy the existence of whatever.
Nobody does that at all. Furthermore when we get into the field we are generally experiencing - I’m sorry, when we get into the field, the audience will generally experience what we’re doing.
They see it as it happens and if we can solve it in the field, we solve it in the field. If we can’t then we’ve got perhaps a paranormal event that took place.
M&C: Are there parts of the country, are there parts of the world that are (paranormically) in your opinion more active, more energetic than others?
Bill Murphy: I’ll say yes. There’s something that actually does happen and I think it’s got an explanation behind it that is - it’s foundations are in science but still I would have to say it’s still paranormal.
And that’s when there is a specific location that has had a lot of people focusing their efforts in a plot for whatever it is, for you know people go for spiritual outreach or they go for you know some sort of - maybe even investigation at the same location over and over.
There are certain lairing that occurs there where there is thought forms that being to manifest at these locations or some sort of telekinesis that remains you know as a residual signature at that spot.
Yes. Specific locations can be changed by thoughts and experiences and particularly feelings. And that phenomena has been documented for many years by Princeton with the global consciousness project to show that there’s a mind matter interaction and it changes the statistics of in this case nuclear decay which is very readily time-able.
You know it doesn’t deviate. Nuclear decay, it’s like you can time a clock to it, that’s why they have atomic clocks. Yet you can take that on or off and you can affect it one way or another.
First it was thought that you could do it through intention. Later it was learned that emotional energy has a bigger footprint and a bigger imprint on a location than on electronically even than does intention and logical thought.
So feeling does take root and can change a location and other people come in afterwards and they can detect these shifts, they can record their own evidence and it may have started with something that occurred there that brought people to that location over and over.
But it does happen and the earth does it as well. There’s specific locations on earth that have unusual geomagnetic properties that are easily measurable and they affect the people that are going to those areas.
Ben Hansen: I really can’t top that. I’ll just say yes, there are locations it seems, hot spots. There’s been a large number of it seems like remote ranches on across the country where all sorts of like a smorgasbord of paranormal events are going on.
And those things really interest me.