A dark room with curtained off windows. Dark decor. An Ouija board on the office table. A bunch of certificates - Gaurav Tiwari, the CEO-founder of Indian Paranormal Society had spent some serious money on learning about ghosts, aliens, the paranormal.
I’ve always believed all this is about the theatrics than actual fact. And these guys seemed desperate to put on a good show. Instead of “OMG how cool” questions these guys had been asked ever since the media discovered them. Let's look through their answers with a magnifying glass instead of painting them with gloss.
1. How do you investigate the “paranormal”?
The Indian Paranormal Society claim to have a “scientific” technique of investigation. What does that mean?
If someone claims a location to be haunted, they perform a “location recce”, during which “hotspots” are marked. Then they set up and check the “surveillance” of recordings and photos. “We go with a very, very, neutral approach If somebody has said...there have got to be many scientific reasons behind that. When all the scientific factors fall down, then we come ahead and declare that thing as paranormal, with proofs", Panjak Trehan, a society member tells me.
But there’s one step missing from their technique - peer review. They claim to have “busted” myths, but didn’t mention asking others to debunk their finds. Their website mentions only one instance of working with a rationalist group, the Maharashtra Andh-shraddha Nirmulan Samity in a school case. And when they worked with rationalists, no ghosts were found, even though schoolkids kids had complained of seeing different faces appearing on the blackboard.
Why not invite the Sanal Edamaruku's Indian Rationalist Association (IRA) or the Satya Shodhak Sabha (Society of Truth Seekers) to attempt to debunk their claims, I wondered later on.
2. How do you get rid of the entities?
“Entities” aren’t kicked out - these guys try to figure out why the “entity” is there in the first place to remove it. “We try to establish communication with them. We request them to leave sometimes. We try to understand why the entities are there...we treat them as “energy.”
3. What energy exactly? Is it quantifiable? Is it electronic energy? Magnetic energy?
3 years ago, in Indian Paranormal Society member Sushmita Chanda had told DNA: Ghosts are electromagnetic energy. However, that's not what Trehan tells me. Instead, he goes into a confusing mishmash of auras, spirits, thoughts, consciousness, which made no sense.
4. If a ghost manifesting itself, then it is burning energy. Where is it getting new energy from?
“The new energy, undoubtedly, it collects from the electronic fields.”
Read that again. A ghost/entity collects energy from electronic fields.
This means ghosts are stealing power.
Mental monologue at this time: Someone call Kejriwal! Audit these ghosts!
When I tried to confirm if ghosts are electrical energy, I was then told: “it has that content. Is it 100% electricity, we say no. Even magnetic energy is there, otherwise how would we talk to it?”
When I mentioned the James Randi Educational Foundation, which pays a million dollars to anyone demonstrating the paranormal in controlled conditions, they were upset by the Foundation's terms. Then Trehan tells me about Randi constantly changing his terms and conditions while inspecting paranormal activity. (nothing shows up). He then told me about a paranormal experiment of Thomas Edison, the guy who invented the lightbulb (also not true).
5. Is there an expiry date to a ghost or an entity? We’ve never heard reports of cavemen ghosts, or dinosaur ghosts.
I had to explain that we only hear of ghosts in the last 200 years, or from some famous battle.
This was apparently a point for another society member to into a ghost story of a poltergeist, an ancient queen ghost, an ancient commander-in-chief-of-an-army ghost, a child in a village, and as usual - a sadhu figure.
6. If we know that you have mapped a ghost/entity at a certain point, why aren’t we experimenting on the ghost?
This was a question that should have set them thinking. What I really meant to ask - WHY THE HELL ARE YOU NOT ELECTROCUTING THE GHOSTS IF YOU KNOW WHERE THEY ARE? Trehan then jumped into a (now completely debunked) story how a man measured a soul’s weight
7. What myths had they busted? What are some places that people consider haunted that actually are not haunted?
I was told of “so many cases”, but they refused to take names of non-haunted monuments. However, they were OK with telling me Bhangarh is haunted (it probably isn’t - visitors as young as kids regularly debunk this on a single fort visit). Here’s the Bhangarh security guard saying that Zee TV might have made the story that it is haunted. Incidentally, Zee TV had worked with the Indian Paranormal Society for this very investigation
When pressed for monuments that were NOT haunted, they mentioned Non-Disclosure Agreements that didn’t allow them to speak up, the need for “permissions”. But they still told said that many places all over India are haunted - without taking no names. Yet, they told me that the route I had taken to their office had a haunted tree. Wow.
8. Did they have Celebrity clients?
“Many”. Including Bollywood. No names, obviously - everything is hush-hush. Seconds after I turned off the mike and began packing to leave, they started talking about aliens, and told me an alien touched a man and burned him alive. I ran.
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