Discovery has a new series coming out called "Ghost Lab", premiering next week. Now, I am a big fan of Discovery Channel and I think shows like Destination: Truth and Ghost Hunters would do better there because there are just a LOT of cynics who won't even engage in a serious discussion simply because they are on the SciFi (now: SyFy) channel.

That being said, my concern isn't that this show will lack credibility — being on Discovery will probably mean this show is taken more seriously than any other paranormal investigatory show — I'm concerned that perhaps Discovery has jumped on this paranormal bandwagon and may end up hurting their own credibility by associating themselves with a group of completely unscientific investigators who just make things up as they go along, tell their viewers it's science, and possibly even partake in some hoaxing.  You know, just like if they'd signed Ghost Hunters (Hey, I said being on Discovery would help GH's credibility, I didn't say what it might do to Discovery's).

But I don't know anything about the investigation team so perhaps my fears are entirely unfounded and if we're lucky maybe this will be something close to what many have been asking after for some time now: a truly scientific approach to ghost hunting.

We'll have a pretty good idea one way or another soon enough.

Mary said:

Before I got Dish TV, and was living in the Innocent - yet Uninformed - Land of Over-the-Air Network TV, I was under the impression that the History Channel was credible, too. 

Then I watched UFO Hunters.

True, and Discovery used to have that show "A Haunting" where it was basically a super-dramatized teleplay of personal accounts as told by the family. Having watched Ghost Hunters since Season One, I've never heard a single one of their clients describe any experiences remotely as harrowing as the stuff portrayed on "A Haunting" — which would lead me to believe the dramatizations might be a little too dramatized. We shall see what quality Discovery has put its good name on this time.

As for UFO Hunters, that show's saving grace is always having a skeptic as part of the team — of course, I miss Ted Acworth. He seemed like a genuine skeptic who would take all the claims seriously but come up with a fair dividing line between what we can reasonably conclude and what's just plain speculation. Kevin Cook seems a little more lax in his skeptical duties to keep Bill from loosing his inner looney and labeling it fact.