Since the beginning of time, man has been obsessed with pondering what happens in the direct moment after we take our final breathe on Earth. Religions have risen and fallen in pursuit of these answers and sciences have been created and destroyed in an attempt to validate the claims of the paranormal. It is in our very human nature to seek gratification through learning and understanding what effect our time in this life has on everything that comes after us.
Renowned astrophysicist Carl Sagan said, "You can't convince a believer of anything; for their belief is not based on evidence, it's based on a deep seated need to believe." Yet, over the past 15 years an incredible resurgence of the need to search out and obtain evidence documenting the paranormal has exploded in modern pop culture. Television shows like Ghost Adventures, Ghost Hunters, Ghost Lab, My Ghost Story: Caught on Tape, and many more, inundate television networks from the Biography Channel to the History Channel. Websites documenting photographic evidence and true life encounters, podcasts about cryptozoology, and a booming literary market of tens of thousands of volumes on the supernatural, ghosts, ghost stories, and life after death are all further proof of this explosion in curiosity.
Where does it come from? At what point did our society open it's doors to paranormal research and investigation and decide it's OK to indulge in this near obsession with the afterlife? This writer, for one, welcomes the change in public opinion, for open dialogue and the sharing of experiences connects the human animal on a deeper and more understanding level.
Upon reviewing what could be described as concrete evidence of EVP's, unaltered photographs of entities and video feed of the living interacting with otherwise unseen forces, how does our culture as a whole attempt to unify this new science with everything we have been taught and come to believe in the past? It is difficult to imagine that our folk lore and urban legends, and all the things that inspire fear and creativity have shaped a true, empirically collected piece of hard evidence. These documented pieces are becoming one with our collective culture and changing opinions in not just religion and spirituality, but in physics, psychology, history and other facets of modern logic that have become globally accepted and respected.
Subscribe to this page and follow in a journey through time, fact, fiction, lore and legends of the paranormal in the United States.
Comments