Argument # 8:  “There is no hard evidence to support any paranormal phenomena.”

 

This is a vague argument because it doesn’t define what constitutes “hard evidence.”  If by hard evidence they mean something solid and tangible, then it would not be possible to obtain this from certain things like UFO’s, ghosts, spirits, or ESP. since they are intangible in nature and possibly involve other dimensions we don’t fully understand yet (could also be the case with UFO’s).  By this standard, we have no tangible evidence for stars, galaxies, black holes, or nebulas that are light years away either, although we can observe them. (Skeptics could argue that they’re just holographic images on a giant movie projector.)  In the same manner, although we can’t reach out and touch UFO’s, we have observed them hovering in the sky and outmaneuvering our best aircraft.  Even if all the photographs and video footage of UFO’s were hoaxed, there are still many cases of sightings that were observed by whole cities or towns, such as the Mexico City mass sighting of January 1995.  This indicates that there’s “something” there causing these mass sightings.  Of course, this “something” could be a whole range of things besides alien spacecraft, but at least it’s not zero evidence and not due purely to imagination.  Though UFO’s show up far less frequently than the other astronomical phenomena mentioned above, infrequent doesn’t mean nonexistent.  The possibility of winning the lottery is also very infrequent too, but not nonexistent.  The same could also go for ghosts, Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, apparitions of the Virgin Mary, etc.

 

If by hard evidence they mean things that we can test and measure with experiments, then this would be difficult to do with ghosts and UFO’s since they are out of our control, but this has already been done and replicated for psychic phenomena like telepathy and telekinesis (See evidence in Arguments # 17, 18).  We have the vastly replicated Ganzfeld and Autoganzfeld controlled telepathy experiments, the 20 year consistency of the Princeton Random Number Generator PK experiments, the controlled tests on psychics such as Uri Geller that he succeeded in, the recent tests on mediums by Dr. Gary Schwartz, Rupert Sheldrake, and others.  Skeptics need to clearly define what they want as hard evidence, rather than being vague about it and then raising the bar when anything is presented.

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