The Complete Approach: A Scientific and Metaphysical Guide To The Paranormal is the opposite of Seeking Spirits. Where Spirits is professional and too slick for its own good, The Complete Approach is earnest and personal.  Jay and Grant's book focuses on anecdote; Dustin Pari and Barry Fitzgerald's work tries to give us nothing less than the theoretical underpinnings of their ghost hunting practice– the hows and whys of their paranormal career. It's apparent that they wrote this themselves and published it in a small press out of their own personal passion for the subject. It is an extremely heartfelt work.

The Complete Approach is also wrong. Wrong, unverifiable, pseudoscientific, contradictory, or incoherent in an astonishing variety of ways. I started sticking post-its to pages with apparent wrongness, and by the end of my reading the book bristled. Here's a random selection of factoids:

• Infrasound was discovered by Vic Tandy.  Actually, Tandy proposed that ghost sightings were explainable by infrasound. He was extremely cool, but infrasound has been around since the 1800s, well before Tandy was born.
• Infrared light feels like acid to ghosts in certain stages of manifestation. Ultraviolet light is similarly ghost-toxic. How did they discover this? How did they verify it? Did someone just say it once? There are no footnotes or other source references, which is frustrating for a book with the word "scientific" on the cover.
• 50% of mental patients are in fact demonically possessed.
• Researchers in Russia say that there are seven types of human, "all on different paths." (p.35-36) Which researchers, where in Russia, what they research, and what they mean by this is left as an exercise to the reader.
• Eating chicken and turkey aids the production of melatonin, which increases one's psychic abilities. Uh… wha? Again, how do they know this? The psychic part, I mean.
• Children can see into the ultraviolet. If so, it's news to the medical profession, the Internet, and my optometrist. I guess it might be true, but it's unsourced, so how can I find out?

The coauthors also champion researchers and other figures that seem just a bit… off. For example, they reference John Hutchinson, "a Canadian researcher who has shown some amazing results in high end EMF." I hadn't heard of Hutchinson before, so I did a bit of research of my own. Apparently, he's part of the antigravity and zero-point energy crowd. He claimed amazing results after attempting to replicate some of Nicola Tesla's experiments, but hasn't been able to replicate his own experiments since the 80s. Marc G. Millis, leader of NASA's Breakthrough Propulsion Physics project, called Hutchinson's work "in the category of folklore." (1) I get a very Walter Bishop feeling about Hutchinson. Other researchers whose work is championed include Peter Hurkos, a psychic with an unconfirmed reputation for being able to solve crimes through paranormal powers. I had just read about Hurkos in James Randi's book Flim-Flam! and was startled to see him described in glowing terms here.

They talk frequently about ultraviolet (UV) light. Apparently ghosts are more visible via ultraviolet light, and mediums, animals, and children can perceive them because they're more sensitive to the UV. Barry's full-spectrum camera is an attempt to see the same way. However, they also believe that ghosts are hurt by the ultraviolet, and that they manifest only at night to avoid it.

To be fair, so long as Fitzgerald and Pari stay focused on the practical aspects of ghost hunting, they give sensible-sounding advice. We are advised that orbs are often dust and that cameras go on tripods. They give good advice on audio recorders: they recommend the Zoom H2, a reasonably-priced audio recorder that can record uncompressed audio and thus avoid some of the problems of cheaper digital voice recorders. There's a far-too-brief chapter on what they call "alternative explanations", which the likes of me call "debunking", or just "explanations". They even provide a decent writeup on infrasound and how it might lead to the symptoms of a haunting. The advice on what to ask clients before an investigation seems reasonable to me, although I'm not particularly experienced in such matters.

My principal disagreement with Pari and Fitzgerald is the crux of the book. The authors draw a distinction between "science", which they seem to think of as the hyper-orthodox, closed-minded purview of self-congratulatory scientists, and "metaphysics, the new science." As they put it:

We tend to forget that yesterday; science was seen as the 'end all' to every question, yet as time has passed, these theories of old (which, we might add, were said to be set in concrete) seemed to fall apart at the seams. Science as we know it is not an exact truth; it, too, has to evolve. As time changes with new discoveries, so, too, does science. (Complete Approach p. 35)

At first, when I read this paragraph, I thought it indicated an understanding that science adapts to new evidence and self-corrects.

However, the coauthors swiftly stop talking about science and start praising "metaphysics". I keep putting the word "metaphysics" in quotes because Fitzgerald and Pari don't use it in its standard sense to mean those branches of philosophy that are concerned with such intangibles as the mind-body problem or free will. Instead, the authors really mean something more akin to pseudoscience or fringe science. They see science as closed-minded and out of touch:

Metaphysics lingers in a world of quantum mechanics that until recently no one even considered seriously. Physicists will openly talk about the possibility of worlds existing in parallel universes, while those that mention they have fairies in the bottom of the garden are seen as needing some help, maybe even a pill or two. Yet this has been recognized in the metaphysical world for hundreds of years. Even today, though under a new name, modern science frowns on it. (Complete Approach p. 35)

Here we have the usual double standard of the paranormal. When science says something that they think they like, such as quantum mechanics' Many Worlds interpretation of the double-slit experiment, they use it as gospel to bolster their views. When science disagrees with them, they're happy to dismiss it as benighted and blundering, hopelessly behind the brand-new yet tradition-based metaphysics.

I wouldn't be quite as bothered by all of this rejection of science if the book hadn't, right there in the subtitle, advertised itself as a scientific guide to the paranormal. To call your approach scientific while actually trying to kick science in the head… not good. Similarly, I don't usually object to a lack of sources noted in the text, but in a supposedly scientific document, "designed and written by researchers for researchers", the inability to figure out where they got some of this stuff they're saying is crippling.

The table of contents promises a structured approach to the vast field of the paranormal, but even the first chapter, on poltergeists, shows what dizzying leaps Fitzgerald and Pari are willing to take. We go from a brief discussion on poltergeists to a somewhat scrambled digression on infrasound (which is apparently both found and not found in poltergeist cases) to a discussion of Hutchinson's work. It's like a brief glimpse of the book we're about to read in a nutshell. Again, the chapters that deal with the practical aspects of ghost hunting are decently organized, but the metaphysical chapters are a brain dump of anecdote and unsourced assertions.

Normally I wouldn't spend much energy on obvious publishing and editing mistakes. In this case, one paragraph, reproduced verbatim below, is too impressive not to repeat:

There was always voluptuous {Note from Erik: this word is out of context here… perhaps you meant something else?} claims from the sensitives that they could sense the spirit, and of course if all else failed, fall back onto their third eye and various chakras {Note from Erik: what are third eyes and chakras? Might need explaining}.

That's a quote. I was left scratching my head and wondering how such a thing might happen. You'd think that before publishing a book, someone would read it!

In the end, I'm not sure what to do with this book. The authors are not bad or stupid men. They obviously worked hard to produce a scientific and metaphysical guide to the paranormal. But whenever they talked about science or metaphysics, I kept thinking, "You keep saying these words. I do not think they mean what you think they mean."

Note 1: "Video Footage of Antigravity?", Newsgroup post, http://groups.google.com/group/sci.physics.research/browse_thread/thread/cf00e68355286a4a/d2103c94a80e3101?hl=en&lnk=st&rnum=2#d2103c94a80e3101

Update: Fixed book title. Apparently it's not just "A" complete approach, it's "The" complete approach. –Stephen