What has science fiction brought to the world of paranormal research?

Well for me science fiction movies opened my eyes to the idea that anything was possible even if not really practical. Surprisingly even the most scary movie monsters have some parts that are based in realty. Let’s take a look at a few. We all know that Frankenstein’s monster was not possible right? You can’t take body parts form one person who is dead and put them in to another person to save their life, ohh but wait we do just that every day with every organ accept the brain. Ohh I know there’s no way we can bring someone back to life with electric shock. Sorry Doctors and Nurses and EMTs do it, all most every day and some of them do it in lab coats. Keep in mind they don’t do it at grave yards in middle of the night. When you think about it that’s one monster that is now at least somewhat based in fact. Ok if we are going to talk about Frank we need to talk about zombies too. What is a zombie? Simply put a zombie is a person who does not have full use of their brain. It is true there might be more zombies than normal people these days. But real zombies can be made and have been made by people who still play with voodoo. To make a zombie, they poison someone to make them look dead then put them in a grave wait till there is brain damage and then dig them up. With better treatment and embalming of the dead, making zombies has stopped in most parts of the world. But let’s not forget the other creature movies, the things that made jaws and cujo so scary was the fact that they could really happen. People get eaten or at least bit by wild creatures every day all over the world, it’s truly is the stuff of nightmares and remember jaws was loosely based on real events. And sadly the truth about rabies is much scarier than in the movies, some people do die from it and the ones that live are only alive because they have gone through a series of very painful stomach injections. As for other monsters in history, the story of vampires can be traced back to two real people Vlad the Impeller Dracul and Elizabeth Bathory the blood countess. Both were way worse than any of the movie monsters killing thousands to tens of thousands of real people. I can remember hearing a story about how bedtime stories and scary movies tell children monsters exist but kids already know they do, these stories tell them that monsters can be killed and not to be afraid of them. We also need to remember not all things that look like monsters are bad or evil. There are people with werewolf syndrome or hypertrichosis, it is a congenital condition were the body is covered with hair, mainly on face and upper torso but underneath they are still people just like you & me. But at the other side of the spectrum there are truly evil people who look just like everyone else, Ted Bundy was one of the biggest serial killers of the 20^th century and was viewed by most as a very good looking man who was nice to most of the people he met, well maybe not the ones he killed.

That brings us to space the final frontier, these are the voyages of our minds or at least they use to be. Since the 60s space travel is something we can do if only in small number. But monsters from outer space have been in our minds and have been a part of science fiction since Orson Wells did the radio shows the war of the worlds. Soon after UFOs were part of pop culture and movies started to involve space creatures and space robots, but most were kind of cheesy. When Star Trek came to TV in the 60s space aliens came into our living rooms. Back then no one knew what aliens looked like so special effects people could let their imagination go. By the time Star Wars came along it was ok to have space aliens and robots as good guys and with computers now being powerful enough help, CG was born. Now special effects people could let their imagination go crazy, anything you could dream of was possible

With CG or computer generated art design, Sci-Fi could take on anything even things that could not be seen like ghosts and of course poltergeists. Some of the scariest things are things we can’t see or understand. In the movie poltergeist we first see the paranormal investigator a person trying to make sense of what’s going on and trying to help little Carol-Ann. For most modern paranormal investigators and I can say I’m one of them it was an ah ha moment we thought that’s what I want to do. But back then most of the research was feeling based and there was no real equipment you could buy. Then came the movie that made paranormal investigation really cool “Ghostbusters” for most of us it brought science into ghost hunting for the first time. Keep in mind most of the cool toys in the movie are still not able to be made for real. But some of the ideas are used today. The idea that we can detect a spirit has led to use of the EMF meter and the thermal camera. Now both are used in other fields but are now widely used in the paranormal field. I know we are more than a few years away from getting our hands on the proton packs and that might be a good thing. As for being able to contain spirits like in the movies that is still in the realm of science fiction but who knows. When we look back it’s easy to see that science fiction has driven science as much as science has driven the movies. I for one am looking forward to the day we meet the men from mars and hope they have not seen the movies on how we treat them, that could be very bad day for us (i.e. war of the worlds)

Best of Luck & Good Research

George Richardson of G&K Paranormal