The Syfy channel raises the stakes again! Not content to insult our intelligence with pseudoscience 24/7, now it gives us pseudoskeptics! It’s six “experts” pretend to be skeptics, even spend a few minutes debunking a few easy videos taken off the internet (there must be thousands of such videos on the internet, so I imagine they pick the ones where the consensus is already pretty much in favor of them being fakes). But when the “experts” roll up their sleeves and start to “investigate”, it’s Amateur City. They screw around with a lot of silly “experiments” and then announce that they are baffled, so the phenomenon must be real!
Here’s an example. They were “investigating” a photograph of a lake creature taken in Pennsylvania. One of them asks if there were any eyewitnesses. Another says, sure, he found two people who saw the same thing years ago! No, moron, we mean any eyewitness while this photo was taken. Apparently there weren’t. And the photographer wishes to remain anonymous, so they can’t question him. They waste a few hours making a fake monster, which naturally doesn’t look exactly like the one in the photo, so they conclude that the lake creature must be a REAL—whereupon they go trolling for it in their boat! Naturally they don’t find it, so the entire “investigation” is a waste of time.
The same goes for the second segment. This was an “investigation” of ghost writing. A man took Polaroid photos in his house, in which mysterious writing appeared. Now, the “expert” photographer on the team saw right away how this could be faked. You open up the Polaroid cartridge in a darkroom, superimpose over the film a screen with the words you want, do a quick flash to set the words on the film, then load it back into the camera. It’s like making a double exposure. But to make their own faked writing, she used the back of a truck as the “darkroom”. When the pictures were taken in the man’s house, there were “unexplained” globs of light on the film (curiously, right where the words would have shown up). The photography “expert” couldn’t imagine what happened, so their verdict (because their experiment failed)—ghost writing must be REAL!
