In his forty-four years dedicated to researching parapsychology, Dr. Barry Taff is certain of one thing: that the paranormal attracts more emotionally disturbed people than any other area of human interest or endeavor.

It’s true. I’ve seen some crazy stuff throughout the years but none attributed to ghosts or ghouls. Most of the craziness comes from behind the scenes of what has become known as the Paranormal World. Ever since I started writing about the paranormal it has been a constant let down for me. For example, in the beginning I figured that the science (soft science) of Parapsychology was something no respectable institution wanted to be associated with because of the relentless skeptical view on the paranormal. It’s true, that’s part of the reason why, but it’s certainly not the full reason. Most places don’t touch parapsychology simply because of fear. Fear of what it invites into their personal and academic life.

Parapsychology is chock-full of crazy people. Those individuals that have blurred the lines between reality and fantasy and live according to those delusions.  It’s also chock-full of con-artists who prey on the gullible. Do you still think that paranormal television show is real? Hah!

Most mainstream scientists shy away from Parapsychology and the controversies the surrounds such science, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that they don’t believe that there is something out there. Something so strange and unexplainable that’s worth studying. Here’s where my friend Dr. Taff comes in. He’s not afraid about the stigma attached to Parapsychology, nor is he afraid of the strange things that go bump in the night. Or those who’ve bumped their heads one too many times.

From his blog BarryTaff.net

WARNING: WHAT YOU’RE ABOUT TO READ MAY ANGER, UPSET AND DISTURB YOU. PLEASE UNDERSTAND, THIS IS NOT A SEXIST, MISOGYNISTIC, VENTING COMMENTARY. NOR IS IT BASED ON WOMEN I’VE DATED OVER THE YEARS. THIS IS BASED ON FORTY-FOUR YEARS OF FIELD WORK, MEETING AND DEALING WITH MANY THOUSANDS OF PEOPLE FOR MANY DIFFERENT REASONS, AND WHILE THIS MAY NOT BE POLITICALLY CORRECT IN TODAY’S DYSTOPIAN WORLD, THIS IS WHAT THE COLLECTIVE EVIDENCE STRONGLY INDICATES, WHETHER YOU AGREE WITH IT OR NOT. NOW BEFORE YOU GO POSTAL AND WRITE ME A SCATHING RESPONSE, PLEASE READ THE LAST SEVERAL PARAGRAPHS OF THIS POST THAT ARE HIGHLIGHTED IN GREEN, BLUE AND RED, AS THEY SERVE AS A QUALIFIER AND DISCLAIMER. REMEMBER, I’VE BEEN OUT THERE IN THE FIELD FOR MORE THAN FOUR DECADES, DOING SCIENTIFIC, INVESTIGATORY RESEARCH AND DOCUMENTATION, YOU HAVE NOT. THIS IS MY INTERPRETATION, ANALYSIS AND CONCLUSION REGARDING A SERIOUS PROBLEM AFFECTING THE PARANORMAL, NOT YOURS.

There is one thing I feel absolutely secure in saying after spending the last forty-four years of my life conducting parapsychological research; that the paranormal attracts more emotionally disturbed people than any other area of human interest or endeavor.  The chronic encounters with such psychotic people never seems to end.  The question is why?

Men or women, tall or short, thin or fat, rich or poor, educated or ignorant, beautiful or ugly, they appear to be everywhere,  and growing in numbers.  Perhaps many such troubled individuals enter this field with the hope of resolving their own emotional demons?  Perhaps others are seeking the greater truth that underlies our presence and reality?  And yet perhaps others, enter it because it requires absolutely no formal education whatsoever to explore, unlike any other discipline of science?

Where to begin?  Let’s start with the most current and then travel backwards in time to see if there’s any obvious pattern to this blatant madness that all-too-frequently accompanies an obsession with the paranormal or ufology.

Several weeks ago I was introduced to a middle-aged woman related to my research work.  This introduction was a professional one, not a social one, at least that’s what I assumed.

Ellen, was quite striking physically, and easily looked twenty years younger than her chronological age.  In our initial conversations, she seemed to be quite pleasant, but there was a disturbing undercurrent associated with speaking to her.   But as this was supposed to be a business contact, I decided to ignore it.  As you’re about to discover, that was a serious error in judgment on my part.

According to Ellen, much of her young life was tortured by alleged entity attachments, where she was unable to sleep well, if at all, for many years.   As she grew older, her delusional sense of reality was reinforced by friends she made who played into her troubled psyche.  She had major problems keeping boyfriends or friends at all, but was unable to understand why.  I am unaware if these delusional episodes of entity attachment were the result of substance abuse, brain damage, or growing up in a totally dysfunctional home with its concomitant abuse and neglect.

From there, she developed a sense that aliens were watching and pursuing her.  What a surprise?  When I asked Ellen why aliens would want to harass her, her reply was that as she was one of the few people on earth who knew what true love was, and that aliens wanted to learn such from her.  Huh?  What?

Then she supposedly learned how to remote view, but every time someone she knew began thinking about her (even though they weren’t even with her at the time), such an act would cause her to get a severe headache.   In fact, not long after we first spoke on the phone, she asked I was remote viewing her, as she was getting a terrible headache.

As I didn’t even know her, why would I even want to do such a thing, let alone to her?   But she was sure, that someone, somewhere, must be remote viewing her causing her great mental anguish.  Yeah, right?  By this point, she was starting to give me a headache just by her ridiculous statements.  She also kept asking me if I could sense any entity attachment to her.  I almost said yes, and that it was from her own brain, but that would have been far too cruel for such a demented individual.

She claims to have repeatedly moved over the years, running from both entity attachment and alien capture.  I think what she was really running from here was her own chemically imbalanced brain and her inability to cope with life’s various emotionally difficult moments.

Then she tells me that she’s gone out into certain wilderness areas and actually met Bigfoot, where she had mental conversations with him, via what she calls “mind-speak”.  I almost asked her if Bigfoot told her to see a psychiatrist, but I refrained.  When I asked her what forest she was out in when such occurred, she refused to tell me as it was a secret place.   Yes, I know, the forest is really in that vacuous space between her ears.

This then evolves into her asking me if I’m actually a hybrid and she could tell her friends that she now knew one.  My response to her was that I didn’t drive a hybrid.  No, she meant an alien hybrid.  She then tells me that one of her best friends is an alien hybrid and asks whether I could tell her where he’s actually from.  She showed me his photo, wherein he appeared to look like someone who’s a couple fries short of a happy meal.  I almost told her that he’s probably from Uranus, or is that your anus, or is it her anus?  Please, just leave me alone.

But wait, it gets much worst.

She then asks if I can take her boyfriend back in timeto undo/change all the negative, emotional imprinting, conditioning and depression he’s

The time machine held by Rod Taylor from “The Time Machine”, (MGM, 1960)

experienced that prevents him from committing to and marrying her.   Sure, it’s called ECT or psychotherapy with medication.  When I told this space cadet that what she asks is impossible, she got very angry with me.  She starts screaming that she knows people who can really do such things and I should come with her to witness such.  Sure they can, and I can fly without a plane.  Now where did I leave my cape and boots?  I then said that I’ve got Clark Kent, Barry Allen, Bruce Wayne and Hal Jordon (Superman, The Flash, Batman and The Green Lantern) at my door, she started really freaking out on me.  When I told her to stop bothering me about such nonsense, her anger grew even worst.

Then she wanted to know if I desire to accompanying her to a cave in Greece to meet some aliens.  My response was that why go all the way around the world when all you have to do is drive through certain areas of Los Angeles to find lots of aliens.  She really flipped out on that one.

Superman, from “Superman/Batman Public Enemies”, Warner Bros, 2010

Perhaps the most telling evidence of her troubled psyche was that she wrote a book on how to win the lottery on a regular basis.  She wanted me to read it, write a review of it, and then endorse it.

My immediate question to her was as to how much money she’s actually won by utilizing her methods, assuming it’d be many millions by now.   Ellen admitted that she hadn’t won a dime, as her method takes lots of practice.  As she doesnot have a job and has all the time in the world to practice what she preaches or writes, I assume that there’s something terribly wrong with her reasoning, judgment and this picture as a whole.  Why would anyone with even half a brain even make such absurd, unsupportable claims, when they themselves have never succeeded at such?   That’s simple, they’re insane.  What she wanted from me was consensual validation and an endorsement, which would never occur, as I do not work with psychotic people.

Without a doubt, Ellen is totally delusional and dissociative, in that she’s living totally within her own demented mind.  The dissociation is so severe, that reality rarely, if ever, intervenes.

Say goodbye Ellen.

Think that Ellen was a little over the edge, here’s someone who almost makes her appear normal.

Earlier this year I met another interesting, middle-age woman through my work, named Brenda.   Brenda claims to be an ascending, celestial goddess

Brenda’s ultimate paranoid threat source?

who was, and still is, an MK-Ultra and Montauk mind control, super-victim.  She incessantly writes and speaks of this, where she belches forth her hyper-kinetic, vergiberating world salads loaded with psycho-babble neologisms.  Her obsessive-compulsiveness on this matter is truly frightening.  She claims to be a medium, a clairvoyant, a professionally trained remote viewer, a witch, and an alien channel (she might want to change that channel?).  However, Brenda neglected the most important self-description of all; that of a blatant, paranoid schizophrenic who used to live in a bus as she was far too disturbed to live among normal human beings in fear that they would soon discover her secret (that her brain had been abducted long ago).

Brenda claims that all of the major rock groups of the 1960′s and 1970′s were actually assets of  the CIA who were systematically controlling and destroying all of our minds with their psychotronically mediated music.  She even goes so far as to claim that when certain musical groups perform or their music is played on radio, it sends out electronic energy to psychotronically harass her both physically and mentally.

If the group was The Doors, did this compel Brenda to run around opening and closing doors?  If it were the Rolling Stones, did she suddenly have the desire to pick up rocks and push them down the road.  If it were the Grass Roots, did she start madly pulling up blades of grass?  Or what if it was Three Dog Night, did she immediately go out and pick up three stray dogs?  If it were the Beatles, I hope she didn’t chase after and capture live beetles?

Brenda openly speaks about how she’s frequently taken out into deep, interstellar space to witness the ongoing battles between the beings of light and the darker, demonic extraterrestrials who want to destroy her, for she knows the truth.

It’s clearly evident that Brenda is a very disturbed woman who is in desperate need of in-patient psychiatric institutionalization with anti-psychotic medication and therapy.  But given the lack of money and facilities dedicated to such emotional disorders these days, she’s totally ignored by the mental health system as she roams around screaming her version of reality to everyone that listens.  She even shows up on various radio and podcasts that are more than happy to disseminate her delusional insanity to an ignorant world.   This is Brenda’s way of getting attention from everyone.

Say goodbye Brenda.

During the summer of 2011, I met this strikingly beautiful girl on an online dating website.  Robin was about ten years younger than myself and was stunning beyond words, but her exterior is where the beauty apparently ceased.

While having dinner with her, she talked about the fact that she’s not really looking for a relationship as she’ll be leaving soon.  Assuming that she was moving to another city or state, I asked where she was moving to.  Then came the shocker.  She wasn’t moving in that sense of the word, she was moving out of life and into death, literally.   WHAT?

I asked her what she’s talking about and she said that she’s going to commit suicide very soon as she hates being alive, but she’s waiting for her daughter to turn eighteen before destroying herself.   Then I asked her why she wanted to meet me.  That response was even more disturbing.  Robin thought that I might be able to help her more more efficiently and effectively transition to the other side due to my life’s work.  Oh my god!

I was rendered speechless for one of the few times in my life.  I then asked her if she was at all concerned over the traumatizing effect her suicide would have on her daughter.  Robin’s reply was, “Oh, I’m sure she’ll be fine with it.”  Talk about selfishness?

Before I got up to leave the restaurant, I asked her if she’d care to give me her new $250,000 AMG Mercedes, as dead people do not need mechanical transportation.  Robin just looked at me with a blank face.  I paid the check and immediately left.  Very nice, not to know you Robin.

Goodbye, good luck, good riddance.  Can it get any sicker that this?  You’ll see.

Lest you think these problems only occur with women, let’s take a look at Kurt from early winter of 2000.

I met this man, a full generation my junior, during the shoot for a cable TV paranormal reality show episode.  Kurt claimed to be a psychic medium and a paranormal investigator, whom I never heard of.  He seemed a little odd right from the start, as he kept asking me the same questions over and over again, like; “Why do you call yourself a parapsychologist”, and if a friend of mine was really psychic.

I gave him the same answers over and over again, but that didn’t seem to work for him.  He finally gave up and left me alone for the remainder of the shoot.

Some years later, I discovered that he was telling anyone who would listen that he worked in the old UCLA parapsychology lab where we were studying him as a psychic, then as a medium.  That Dr. Thelma Moss had taken him under her wing as her special subject.   Kurt apparently had/has some serious reality issues, or is just a bald faced liar, figuring that no one would ever challenge him on this matter.   Wrong.

Kurt’s tall tale then evolved into his saying that he was part of a secret, government program that was training him as a psychic medium to work for the military and intelligence community.  What the hell is he talking about?

He seems to have overlooked the fact that when the lab was up and running (1967-1978), he wasn’t even twelve years old, and therefore would not have been allowed to work with us for any reason whatsoever.   The Human Use Committee regulations governing research work at UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute and the entire medical center, strictly forbid us from dealing with children under the age of eighteen, even if the parents consented.

Making his assertion even more outlandish is the fact that we never trained anyone to be a medium for any reason whatsoever.  While we did have a psi training group (see my other blog on this site entitled “Learned Psi: Training To Be Psychic”) that ran from 1970 through 1987, he was not a participant in such as we never met him.  I ran this research program and would have certainly remembered meeting someone as  young as him and would have stopped any effort on his part to participate in our work.  Apparently, that wasn’t sufficient to stop Kurt from continuing this diatribe.

After about eleven years of this nonsense, I finally directly confronted Kurt on this matter and warned him that if he persisted with his misinformative effort to falsely establish a background that never existed as related to the lab and myself, there would be severe legal repercussions and consequences for it.

His reason for doing this is quite clear.  By making such a claim, it automatically gives him a level of official credibility that he otherwise did not have.  Being formally associated with our old lab would be a form of consensual validation, objectively verifying his claims of unique paranormal talents.  Kurt is just another of the many opportunists out there trying to take advantage of what the past offered that was beyond his grasp.  Fortunately, Kurt finally ceased his efforts in this regard.  At least I believe he did.

However, the real question about Kurt is as to whether he really believes what he is saying?  If he actually believes it, then he’s psychotic and has lost the ability to differentiate between reality and fantasy?  If he knows that this all a fabrication he’s invented to make himself appear more important than he really is, then he’s no more than a somewhat clever opportunist in a field that is not, at all, monitored or controlled.

A subtle distraction here for a brief moment.  The day that Michael Jackson died several years ago I was talking with one of my colleagues about how long it will take some nut job to pop up claiming they’re communicating with his spirit.

Two days later, I received a call from a woman I barely knew, telling me that she’s already speaking with Jackson’s spirit.  I had but a single response to her comment; “What took you so long?”   I believe that my reply says it all, although she did start receiving death threats for so quickly attempting to financially profit from Jackson’s untimely death.

In 2005, I began investigating a local haunting case.  This case demonstrated some extraordinary geophysical and paranormal events, and offered the possibility of helping to us to clarify many of the poorly understood variables associated with such occurrences.  This case offered such informational potential, that I visited this location a total of sixteen times over the course of one year.

The owner and resident of the property, a middle-aged man named Alan, seemed relatively normal at first glance.  The case produced rather significant instrumental data coupled with personal witness accounts that were truly extraordinary.  However, it also produced a permanent change in Alan’s personality.

It wasn’t long before Alan began talking like he was having a literal conversation with spirits in the room.  There were points where he began screaming at us as he kept saying “They’re telling me to…….” whatever.  I thought Alan was actually talking with real, live people on the other end of the phone, when in reality he was supposedly having direct conversations with several ghosts that were inhabiting his home.

Not long thereafter, Alan, myself and several others were having dinner at a local restaurant, when Alan’s eyes suddenly rolled back in his head and he again began speaking as if he he was having a direct dialog with someone not visible in the booth with us living humans.

It was not surprising to learn that Alan started having seizures not long after he moved into his new haunted house.  However, as Alan was very cryptic about his health when asked specific questions, we had no way of really knowing if these seizures were ever experienced prior to living in his current home.

After this, I decided to walk away from this potentially rewarding case.  If the residents judgment and reasoning suddenly disappear to be replaced by conversations of the dead in any location, I’d say it’s time to walk away.  And that’s exactly what we did.

There are numerous other disturbing incidents involving men, but they are so vile and disgusting in many respects that I’ve chosen not to discuss them publicly.  The absolute psychopathology related to this cases make me sick to just think about them, as most are linked to violent or even criminal matters that are best left to proper legal and law enforcement professionals.  The purpose of this commentary is to educate and inform, not to sicken or nauseate.

During the summer of 1987 the MUFON Los Angeles set up several support groups dealing with the fallout from Whitley Streiber’s new book Communion.  Apparently,Communion touched some nerves in some people, all of whom were seeking help and answers trying to emotionally cope with their alleged UFO abduction experiences.

While there were those individual who might have had actual abduction experiences, a high percentage of them were either delusional or experiencing some form of psychotic break where they could no longer distinguish between reality and fantasy. This is where this particular story begins.

While attending one of these MUFON support groups, I met with a young lady by the name of Val.  She began relating her account of being repeatedly abducted  over the years,  I listened intently, but the feeling I was left with was that this woman was psychotic and required professional psychiatric assistance as opposed to input from any of us with MUFON.  I told her that her experience was interesting, but it fell outside the purview of our groups work due to its extreme nature.  Fortunately, I never heard of her again, or at least that’s what I thought.

In the late 1990′s, I was online and found a blog she posted regarding our meeting at the MUFON group.  She stated that she instantly knew upon meeting me that I was sneaky and underhanded and could not be trusted.  That I instantly hypnotized her and gained control of her mind.  According to her I went home and used psychotronic weapons in my basement to direct demonic entities to attack and rape her as she walked around during the course of her daily life.   But wait, there’s much, much more.

She continues on to say that I used her case as the basis for The Entity novel and movie,  What?  There’s something really wrong with this woman’s thinking at many different levels.

Let’s see just how utterly insane this woman really was/is.  The real Entity case occurred in 1974-5.  The novel was published in 1978, and the movie was released by Fox in 1983.   That’s odd, I didn’t have the displeasure of meeting Val until the summer of 1987!  See a little problem here with temporal discontinuity?  Apparently, this inverted temporal reality must have really resonated with Val, as she was never phased by the absurdity and impossibility of what she was saying?

Where is Val now?   I don’t know and I really don’t care or want to know, as long as she stays far away from me.

Let’s now jump ahead eleven years to 1998.  I was giving a lecture for a group in Anaheim.  To my surprise, an old girlfriend named Linda, from the mid-1970′s showed up.  She looked great, no fat, lines or wrinkles, at least on the surface.  But what lay beneath was anything by great as I was about to discover.

Linda comes up to me after my talk and I introduced her to one of my colleagues who was attending the event with me.  Out of the blue, Linda starts talking about how she needs my help to assist her and Jesus Christ to defend themselves against demonic aliens who have joined forces with the CIA and FBI to destroy the world, but first they must destroy her because she knows too much about what’s really going on.  Haven’t I heard this one before somewhere?

We just stood there not knowing what to say or how to respond.  My colleague and I looked at each other with confused looks on our faces.  When I originally knew Linda, she never made such insane comments, nor was their any hint of religious zealotry from her.  What happened to her in the last twenty years to induce such a state of paranoid delusions from supernatural persecutors?

On the way back home I told my colleague that if she had behaved like this when I first met her I never would have even asked her out.  She was always a little different, but that kind of goes with the territory when one meets people through their efforts in parapsychological research.

Several weeks later Linda showed up at my door and continued her ranting on the same subject.  I would not let her in, but I talked to her outside.  She sounded very unstable and suicidal.  I sternly suggested that she seek out psychiatric counseling as it appeared that she was unable to differentiate between reality and fantasy, one of the earmarks of psychosis.  She finally left.

Several weeks went by and she called to inform me that something compelled to walk into the path of any oncoming car.  Fortunately, she was only mildly injured, but she was sure what caused her to do what she did was the demonic aliens and the CIA.  Of course they did?  She was kept in a psychiatric facility for several days and then they released her, thinking she was of sound mind and body. They were wrong.

Several weeks after this event Linda once again attempted suicide by again stepping out in front of another oncoming car,  Once again, fate was on her side and she was spared any real physical injury, although her brain was certainly fried by her psychosis at this point.  She was again on a 72-hour hold and then released.

Linda kept calling me every couple of months asking for my help, and I simply told her that she was delusional and needed help I could not give her. Then I did not hear from her for quite a while and I mistakenly thought that perhaps things had calmed down.  I was wrong.

In February of 2008 she again called asking for my help.  However, this time she claimed that the earth was about to explode, of course due to the work of those pesky demonic aliens.  I couldn’t pass up the  opportunity here to throw a zinger at her.   I immediately commented, “Excuse me Lara, I’ve got to send baby Kal-El off to his new world before Krypton explodes!” and I then hung up.  I’m confident that Linda did not understand what I was referring to here.  Do you?

Read the rest over at his blog: BarryTaff.net