Book Review: Cowden’s “Spirit Voices” Makes Us Want to Listen More Carefully
So far as my own involvement with researching the unexplained, I’ve always tended to be multidisciplinary. While writing articles for magazines about cryptozoology, I would be spending my weekends enthralled with psychic research. Or while studying UFO eyewitness reports, the somewhat more predictable allure of haunted houses was where I often spent time doing “field work.” I say this was “predictable” because, at very least, when a house or other building is purportedly haunted, there is some rationale for use of this environment as a sort of laboratory, in the sense that a repeatable phenomenon is said to occur there, contained within the environment. The same cannot be said for the study of UFOs or creatures like Bigfoot, for if either of these exist, it will be harder to predict their appearances by virtue of the random chances involved with encountering them.
Therefore, for a number of years, I spent time joining various researchers in the field studying what, again, I prefer to call “psychic phenomenon.” I say this because, thanks in part to the highly-entertaining Ghost Busters films from back in the 1980s and 90s, the public began to take elements of actual psychic research and parapsychology, some of which involved ghosts and purported haunted locations, and began to steer them towards “ghost hunting” escapades with very little–if any–potential for scientific merit. Though I’ve often had the pleasure of working with individuals who were very scientific in their approaches to psychic research and paranormal phenomenon in the past, I’ve worked with far more who were content to cut corners, and leave themselves open to high-credulity, for the sake of gathering “data” that was conducive to what they were trying to express, rather than what the details actually warranted. This particular human trait can be found within many fields whether it’s psychic research or your bank and their CD rates. An individual may want to take great care as to the source of the information they make decisions with.
This eventually led to a bit of disenchantement on my part, at least so far as studying parapsychology and related areas, and I began to notice that my own interests–as well as what my audiences seemed to anticipate from me–began to gravitate heavily toward the subject of ufology and unexplained aerial phenomenon. Nonetheless, I still enjoy books on psychic research, and even ghosts, when they are presented well, and when the details warrant some factual merit that can be substantiated, rather than merely being wild claims of the extraordinary. It’s no wonder, then, why I became so excited upon hearing about the release of a new book by audio technician and paranormal investigator Mark L. Cowden, called Spirit Voices: The First Live Conversation Between Worlds by Anomalist Books.
