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Marcello Truzzi defined a skeptic as someone who was 100% Neutral, 100% Agnostic on the paranormal. A believer can believe in the paranormal, but a skeptic who doesn’t believe in the paranormal isn’t really a skeptic according to him; he’s a “pseudoskeptic”. That sounds good in theory, but in practice if you study a topic for long enough, you come to have some opinion one way or another. I don’t call myself an agnostic; I call myself an atheist. It’s not because I claim to have absolute proof that God doesn’t exist. It’s simply because after all these years, I have an opinion. I lean in the direction of thinking that God probably doesn’t exist.

It’s the same with the paranormal. I’ve seen so much “evidence” that turned out to not be evidence at all that I tend to lean in the direction of thinking the paranormal probably doesn’t exist. That doesn’t mean my mind is closed or that I couldn’t be persuaded.

Let’s take a specific example. Say someone shows me a video that’s supposed to be a ghost. I tend not to believe in ghosts, so I look at it skeptically. I try to think of what else could explain the image besides a disembodied spirit. If I happen to think that it looks more like a spider crawling across the lens of the camera and therefore so close that it is a blur, that’s good enough to convince me that it probably is a spider. I DON’T claim to have PROVEN that it’s a spider (unless of course it happens that I can prove it). But the probability that it’s really a ghost has just dropped considerably in my opinion.

OR lets say that it’s not a spider. Let’s say for a moment that I rule out everything — insects, dust motes floating in the air, reflections from some off-camera light source, a hoax, everything. Let’s say I can’t explain what it is. It’s an unexplained image, but not conclusive enough to convince me that it’s a disembodied spirit.  But then the burden of proof is not on me — it’s on the person making the claim that it’s a ghost. THAT PERSON has to PROVE that it’s a disembodied spirit. It’s not enough to say that it LOOKS like a ghost. It’s not enough to say, “What else could it be?  If you can’t prove that it’s NOT a ghost, it must BE a ghost.”  That would the fallacy of argument from ignorance.  Marcello Truzzi himself said, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.” He just seems to forget that when he’s criticizing skeptics.