Website Changes, formats of reports

All of our reports are going through some format changes. For those of you who are familiar with our site, we file reports on every ghost hunt and investigation that we do. This often results in multiple reports on a particular location as we go through the investigative process. We did this to keep a visible record of what was done and to provide information to those folks that like to offer their  input for alternative explanations and other ideas. It also provided a step by step look at the process itself. The final report was then compiled from the html reports into a pdf file where we gave it either a "Solved" or "Unsolved, Closed" status.  

While this seemed like a good idea when we started doing it this way, it appears that it has several flaws.

This was identified when we were sent this link.

http://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2011/06/anson-light-busted.html

"After my last failed attempt at ghost busting I went home to research what the various paranormal investigation groups had determined about the light. The best analysis I found was a 2001 report by the Southwestern Ghost Hunters Association. According to their report, the SGHA thought that the Anson Light is caused by the oncoming headlights from US-277 which is perfectly aligned with the dirt road where the Anson Light is observed.

As best I could tell from their online report, the SGHA didn't actually trace the light to its source. They mainly drew their conclusion by zooming in on the light with their video camera where they said they could make out the car lights on US-277. However, I've looked at the light through binoculars with students and while some of them see car lights others disagree. So if we really wanted to settle the question we'd need to do something the SGHA didn't do: Trace the lights to their origin. Only then would we have the definitive "proof" that the Anson Light isn't a ghost light."

 

The issue here is that we did test that hypothesis and proved that it was actually caused by the headlights of cars. The methodology and results of that test were published in our third report.  However it is apparent that Richard  only saw the second report where we started forming the hypothesis to explain the phenomena. He never looked at the final report.

After looking into the issue we discovered that the search engines were hitting on the most recently updated report.  When the third report was finished and uploaded to the server, the second report was then updated with a link to the third. So the second report is what pops up on search results. We also found some links that were missing or pointing to the wrong file. While we could go through hundreds of files to make sure they are correct it might not correct the problem.

So the html reports are going away. We are going to put all the information from all hunts and investigations into a single  pdf  file.

To accommodate the reports where we have not reached an conclusion, we will add a new classification, "Unsolved, Open".  

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