How about misguided? I read an web-article some years ago called The Ghost in My House: An Exercise in Self-Deception by Bertram Rothschild. Basically Bertram says one day he saw the closed door to his bedroom, open of it’s own accord. How did that happen? One-by-one, he eliminated all possibilities he could think of until the only thing he could think of was “a ghost did it”. Then he started hearing noises in his house that he could not explain. Finally he came to his senses and realized that, “When rational explanation failed to settle the matter, [we invoke] spirits and magical events…without an understanding of the event, my brain simply created a magical explanation despite my years of looking at the universe in a rational way. We all do that. Our brains fill in the blanks, and without considerable debunking effort we fall prey to such ‘explanations.’ Children do this all the time”. The noises were normal noises all houses make when settling, and the door remains unexplained due to insufficient evidence, not that he saw a ghost do anything as he imagined must have happened.

Carl Jung mentioned something similar in his work: “…whenever man encounters something mysterious he projects his own assumptions into it without the slightest self-criticism” (Vol 11, para 95) and “…I know of three more cases where certain objects were seen in the clearest detail (in two of them by two persons, and in the third by one person) and could afterwards be proved to be non-existent. Two of these cases happened under my direct observation…people who are entirely compos mentis and in full possession of their senses can sometimes see things that do not exist…For as a rule we do not verify things we have seen with our own eyes, and so we never get to know that actually they did not exist.” (Vol 10, para 597)

I am not saying that all claims of the paranormal are misguided. Certainly there are some liars, although I rarely see paranormal researchers perceptive enough to see a liar and call them one. Sometimes there are claims based on illusions or hallucinations but never have I read about a claim that was real life. Whenever I have challenged someone to test me with their claim that a place is haunted, for example, if ghosts exist they must flee from me in fear whenever they see me coming, because when I appear to confirm the claim, the ghosts magically disappear. I wonder why?

I think it would earn me nothing more that a well deserved slap across the face!

While I agree that creating UFOs through thought is a bit of a crock I really don’t see how Quantum Mechanics might at least have something to tell us about stuff like ghost sightings some day.

Or are all paranormal events a huge amount of BS and their experiencers/witnesses a bunch of rabid liars…?

The reason for this quantum mechanical zoo is that the whole discipline of quantum mechanics is based on a still unresolved mystery for there has not yet been one single person able to explain the two-slit experiment with a mechanically repeatable experiment, and until that is done, quantum mechanics will remain the glorious stuff of New Age gurus. They are cowering behind the unknown where they can safely take pot shots at our intelligence. If scientists cannot yet explain the most basic quantum mechanics principles, what makes these nimwits believe they can use the unexplained to explain the unprovable? I mean altering someone else’s reality with just thought alone? Creating UFOs from thin air using brain power? Give me a break!

All of a sudden such things as Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, quantum entanglement, and Feynman’s sum over (particle) histories, can be thought of as explaining lots of wierd and wonderful things.

But even if this happens I have to wonder what difference this will make to the acceptance of such things, and won’t they just remain highly unlikely phenomena…?

And just how far distant a prospect would this be if a TOE has to include a wave function that can accurately predict/display all future and past events at any given point in spacetime…?

All I can say is… I hope we work some of it out in our lifetime