Sorry but I didn't realize you needed ALL the details before you tore it apart. Maybe you'd like to know what program they were watching and what they were all wearing. Maybe they were watching the Exorist and they all had the same hallucination.
I didn't "tear it apart" because there wasn't really much to it. A telephone falling off a table is not that amazing. Sure, I could fly out to your friend's house and listen to the story of how far it flew and measure the distances and so on. I'd still have no proof that anything untoward happened.
You're absolutely right: you don't have enough evidence to draw a conclusion, yet you do it anyway. You've concluded that either I'm lying, or my friend and all her family are lying or exaggerating.
No I haven't. I've drawn a tentative conclusion that your flimsy story doesn't justify a wholesale change in my worldview. Here's how my mind works on this: Either everything I believe about the nature of reality is completely wrong, or someone I don't know is lying or mistaken. In the absence of any evidence, the conclusion I am forced to provisionally adopt is the latter. Do you really think I should do things differently?
This isn't an isolated incident at their house, other weird things have happened too.
Then they're in an ideal position to produce some evidence. If they're in North America, then they probably have a video camera on about 60% of the time anyway, so if these things are happening frequently, they should eventually be able to capture them on film. It might take a while but it's worth a million dollars.
No, I think there's probably a logical explanation for alot of "paranormal" happenings, but not for all of them. I don't believe John Edwards Crossing Over is anything more than a scam that he's set up and which I think should be banned. Ditto for Sylvia Brown and a couple other so-called "psychics" that I've seen....I think they're all scam artists.
It's a very frustrating part of being a skeptic, that when confronting and exposing charlatans believers will agree: "OK, he's a charlatan and so is she but this one guy I know...." Unfortunately there will always be new cases. All the cases of alleged supernatural activity that have ever been explained satisfactorily have been explained as normal events, hoaxes or mistakes, unusual but natural phenomena etc. Common sense suggests putting the unexplained in the same pile until evidence suggests otherwise. Unfortunately, many believers equate "unexplained" with "supernatural".
But when someone I've known all my life tells me about incidents that have happened in her home, I don't assume that she's lying or exaggerating: I believe her. I have no reason not to.
I've never met her - or you, for that matter. Why would I believe such a story?
We agree on one thing: we obviously have very different viewpoints on this subject and we're obviously not going to agree or convince each other of anything, so there's not much point in discussing it any further.
Nonsense. I'm open to new beliefs even if you're not. In fact, this time last week I quite firmly believed that Homo sapiens was the only species of hominid to have existed on Earth in the last 30,000 years. I now no longer believe that. I believe that there were hobbit-like creatures in Indonesia up to 13,000 years ago and possibly even into recorded history. Any ideas why I believe that and not your story?