Italian Cashier Hypnotized
Quirky news story of the week is the case of the Italian supermarket checkout operator who was hypnotized by a cunning criminal into handing over a wad of cash. Apparently she didn't realise what had happened until her till didn't balance at the end of the shift.
Interestingly I haven't see any news stories tackle the question of whether this is a plausible story. I suspect we'll hear more, but allow me to pre-empt the result with my guess...
First of all, you can't just approach someone and hypnotise them instantly to do your bidding. Many people are immune altogether, and only the most suggestive are likely to be controllable in the reported fashion. The thief would probably want to select and groom the victim before the main event, just to make sure she was going to react as needed.
Hypnotism can't make you do anything that you consider morally wrong. If the girl was genuinely hypnotized, the criminal must have been even more cunning than most people would think. Perhaps he could have suggested that the money was for a worthy cause, or that he had been given permission to take it. However it does smell fishy - the ease of the apparent hypnotism makes me suspicious.
I have no strong gut feeling either way, but if I had to put money on it, I'd bet that the cashier was an accomplice. I wouldn't convict her without hard evidence of course, but I'd certainly be looking at her closely if I was on the investigative team.
I must emphasize this: I do believe that the hypnotism reported in this story is unlikely but certainly possible. "Innocent until proven guilty" and all that. Let's see what happens.
Labels: Paranormal, Ponderblog
Update: Paranormal-Encyclopedia.com
I'm currently negotiating with a researcher to write articles for www.paranormal-encyclopedia.com. It's looking very promising and it's also giving me some enthusiasm to have another burst with the site. I've started re-writing some of the existing articles and there's a chance the site will be ready for wider publicity within a couple of months.
I'm still keen to hear from anyone who wants to contribute articles though. Let me know if you're interested.
Labels: Paranormal
Horoscope Test
I noticed an ad on the paranormal-phenomena.info site for a free horoscope. The ad claims 100% accuracy and a free test. I filled out the form and I should receive my personal horoscope within two days - I'll tell you how it turns out in the comments for this post.
At the same site you can also sign up for a free weekly horoscope. Sweet, I've been wanting to do a long-term horoscope test so I've signed up and I'll document the results. To be fair I'll give it plenty of time to see how useful it is, perhaps a year. Let's go.
Labels: Paranormal
Is Religion a Natural Human Behaviour?
I've just noticed an interesting project being undertaken at Oxford University, attractively titled 'Empirical Expansion in Cognitive Science of Religion and Theology'.
The £1.9 million project aims to figure out whether religion is a natural human behaviour, and if so, whether this fact supports or contradicts theological and paranormal propositions.
Sounds like fun. Someone remind me about this in a couple of years - I want to know if anything useful results. More than anything I'm interested in whether they come up with an investigative methodology that would be acceptable to both scientists and religious leaders. I doubt it because, like most paranormal propositions, religion has built-in escape clauses to evade such scrutiny. Still I like to imagine some simple test that would indisputably answer the question "Does God exist or did someone just make Him up?"
Of course no such test is possible but even if it was, people like Brian Tamaki could just say it was the Devil confounding our minds. Religious people think atheists are deluded and vice versa. So shall it always be.
Here's the project details.
Labels: Paranormal, Ponderblog
Paranormal Encyclopedia
www.paranormal-encyclopedia.com is a project I started at the beginning of 2007. It's been low on my priority list but I do have high hopes for it (I seem to say that a lot about my projects).
The idea for an encyclopedia-style website evolved from my original paranormal site
www.paranormal-phenomena.info. I was never happy with the original site - I wanted a better domain as well as a more organized layout. It was Ange who came up with the encyclopedia theme idea and I was quite embarrassed that I didn't think of it myself, especially because I was about to spend a lot of money acquiring an inferior domain from a squatter. The encyclopedia is a much better approach than what I was doing before.
Most of the stuff that's currently on this site wasn't written by me - I commissioned a researcher to write about 100 articles. Unfortunately the only researcher I could afford was one of those Asian outfits that can't speak the Queen's English. Consequently the quality of the articles varies from poor to unreadable. I am therefore in the market for a good editor who feels up to the challenge of re-writing this mess into something comprehensible.
BTW, my angle with this website is that of a skeptic. It's a shame that few people understand what a skeptic is. Most people think it means a person who doesn't believe stuff. That's not true - skeptics are happy to believe, they just ask for a good reason to believe first.
Anyway, I'm aware that I need to fix this site up and I hope to do so in 2008. If you want to help by writing new articles or editing existing ones, leave a comment and we'll talk.
Labels: Paranormal
