William A. Lester was standing in a driveway, talking to a couple. They had seeing things, they said, paranormal things. That?s why Lester was there.
Lester was taking notes. How often did they see it? How fast did if fly? Did it hover? Did it look like anything they?d ever seen before?
It looked like a triangle, they said, a large black triangular object with a red light and it flew really low over their house but it didn?t make any noise.
?That?s really unusual,? Lester said. ?A conventional object, a conventional aircraft of that size would have to make an incredible noise.?
And then, while they were standing there talking, it flew overhead. It looked exactly like they said it looked, Lester said. It didn?t make a noise and it flew so low that the red light shone on the roof.
?I know I was seeing something real. I saw it myself, so that was a real UFOs case,? he said.
Lester, a Jonesboro resident, has a doctorate degree in parapsychology from the American Institute of Holistic Theology in Birmingham, Ala. He teaches classes at his own American Institute of Metaphysics and will be hosting a conference in Decatur in the end of October called the X-Conference. He has written three books on paranormal phenomena, including ?Star Messiah? which explored the possibility of a relationship between the rise of world religions and extraterrestrial and ?Dimension X,? which is a field guide to the paranormal.
?Some people see ghosts in every shadow, some people see UFOs in every sky, but everything is not a mystery,? Lester said. ?Some people investigate for the purposes of debunking, they go into the investigation with the assumption that it?s got to be untrue. I go into the investigation, approach the research with the thought, ?I don?t know.??
Lester has been interested in paranormal phenomena since he was 7. He saw a documentary on the Loch Ness Monster, Big Foot and other things classified as ?unsolved mysteries,? and was fascinated. He began to read everything he could find on anything paranormal and, eventually, became an expert.
?One thing leads to another,? he said, which might be an explanation of his research. Lester is a generalist, letting explorations of Big Foot sightings lead him to the study of ghosts which lead him to the study of UFOs which lead him to look at conspiracy theories. He describes himself as a generalist, interested in everything that?s unexplained and unsolved.
He?s seen a lot of things during the course of his investigations and research. Some of them he?s convinced are real. Some he knows are hoaxes.
?I?ve seen every kind of thing hoaxed. Yes, there are hoaxers, but that does not account for the totality of the phenomena reported,? he said. ?There are hoaxers, charlatans, thrill seekers. I deal with that small percentage of reports that tend to suggest real phenomena.?
Paranormal studies abandon some parts of the accepted scientific method. Lester said he does use some traditional methods of investigation though, including observation and eye witnesses.
?Eye witness testimony can send you to the electric chair. You can?t change the value of eye witness testimony because it makes you uncomfortable,? Lester said. ?There are millions and millions of reports of UFOs. If you have millions and millions of reports of anything, I don?t think a rational person can say there?s nothing there, that it?s a mass hallucination or something.?
Mainstream scientists can?t accept paranormal phenomena, Lester said, because of the accepted scientific framework. The Western scientific method requires that something be reproduced in a lab to be accepted. Ghosts and UFOs and monsters can?t be tested, Lester said, but they?re still real.
?In Western cultures, reality is based on the ability to quantify something. A ghost is not something you reproduce on demand or contain within a lab environment, so by default mainstream science has to classify ghosts as unreal,? Lester said. ?The definition of reality is actually bigger than the scientific method can account for.?
http://www.news-daily.com/features/loca ... d=topstory
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