Heh. Just stumbled across this:
In June 2008,
Ghost Hunters was awarded
The Truly Terrible Television (TTTV) Award by
Independent Investigations Group for peddling
pseudoscience and superstition to its audience.
- and -
According to investigator Benjamin Radford, most ghost hunting groups including TAPS make
many methodological mistakes. "After watching episodes of
Ghost Hunters and other similar programs, it quickly becomes clear to anyone with a background in science that
the methods used are both illogical and unscientific".
Anyone can be a ghost investigator, "failing to consider alternative explanations for anomalous ... phenomena", considering emotions and feelings as "evidence of ghostly encounters." "Improper and unscientific investigation methods", for example, "using unproven tools and equipment", "sampling errors", "ineffectively using recording devices" and "focusing on the history of the location...and not the phenomena."
In an article for
Skeptical Inquirer, Radford concludes that ghost hunters should care about doing a truly scientific investigation: "I believe that if ghosts exist, they are important and deserve to be taken seriously. Most of the efforts to investigate ghosts so far have been badly flawed and unscientific — and not surprisingly, fruitless." In a
New York Times article about
Ghost Hunters and TAPS, Radford contended that "the group and others like it
lack scientific rigor and mislead people into thinking that their homes are haunted."
The show's editing has been questioned, such as activity that is not captured on tape and findings that are unsupported by evidence in the show specifically. Tools are used in ways that are not proven effective, or in ways in which they have been proven ineffective, such as
infrared thermometers that are claimed to detect cold spots in the middle of rooms when such tools are able only to measure the surface temperature of objects.
[11]
Techniques with thermal imaging cameras,
Geiger counters,
electronic voice phenomenon, and
EMF detectors are used with
little or no explanation as to how the techniques have proven to provide evidence of ghosts or other entities. There are concerns that the devices are misused, such as the noting of Benjamin Radford's article for
Skeptical Inquirer: "you may own the world's most sophisticated thermometer, but if you are using it as a barometer, your measurements are worthless. Just as using a calculator doesn't make you a mathematician, using a scientific instrument doesn't make you a scientist."
