Controversial Youtuber, Exploring With Danny, who was a prolific faker of the paranormal, and got arrested during his search for Nicola Bulley, is now a debunker.
I never watched him before, but took more of an interest when The Shape reviewed Danny's first debunking video, which Danny deleted because, unsurprisingly, he got a lot of flak from the other prolific fakers.
After that deletion I checked his channel every now and then, and he was flip flopping over what he wanted to do with it. At times all his videos were removed, since he thought he was going to be a gaming channel instead.
Now he seems to have settled into debunking, with a view to also exploring places where activity supposedly happened, to see how it could have been fabricated.
While I don't particularly like the guy, from what I know of him, it's interesting to see a poacher turned gamekeeper. A crook to catch crooks, since he knows the tricks of the trade, from using fishing line or video editing to create 'poltergeist activity'; triggering K2 EMF metres to light up on order to simulate 'contact with ghosts', and even making sounds on the fly by shuffling a foot or rubbing an arm against a jacket during EVP recording sessions.
Watching Nuke's Top 5 there's very few videos that don't look like they've either been intentionally faked, misinterpreted, or where the audience is being lead to a paranormal conclusion. Many viewers are easy to fool because they're desperate to believe, jumping to the illogical before considering the logical.
There was an interesting case yesterday. Two channels happened to put up videos exploring the same house.
Finders Beepers History Seekers are more straight forward urban explorers who don't go looking for the paranormal (though odd things sometimes happen). They explored the house and nothing occurred at all. Their video went up yesterday morning.
Adam Mark Explores and Dead City Paranormal, who collaborate on explores/ghost hunting, both put up their videos of the same house yesterday evening.
From the way certain objects had been left by Finders Beepers, it appears that Adam Mark and Dead City Paranormal, went in soon after (and no one else moved things in between).
Naturally they found lots of evidence with their K2 meters, Necrophonic app, and some very 'convincing footage' of poltergeist activity.
In both Adam's and DCP's videos a clonk, clonk, clonk is heard from another room, which baffles them.
Fortuitously (and suspiciously), Adam had a static camera set up in the room where noise came from to capture the event, which strongly implies it was a set up. The noise was a candlestick being pulled off the mantlepiece, which most viewers regarded as an excellent capture of paranormal activity.
I suspect it was achieved using video overlay. That is, one of them knocked the candlestick down and edited themselves out of the shot by overlaying it with a clean frame. Then a muffled clonk, clonk, clonk would be added later to videos of them in the other room, to which they were shown reacting.
A small table also moved in the room where they were conducting their investigation, which was only caught by a static camera. This one's harder to debunk as they were both visible in the shot, but based on the direction of the channel it was either set up, or explained by some other rational means.
It's sad that so few urban explorers are willing to resist the temptation of faking paranormal, as they all know that's where the big viewing numbers come from. Thankfully there are still a few holdouts, such as Finders Beepers and Hell on Earth. (The latter is my new favourite urban exploration channel).
Out of curiosity I took screen caps of the room where the incident occurred, though there was no evidence that Adam had messed with anything prior to knocking the candlestick off.
For the record, Finders Beepers' Andy didn't "almost quit" due to anything paranormal (they aren't a paranormal channel), but because Matt was being an utter ass to him for most of the explore.
EDIT:
Forgot that I should've added that Finders Beepers bring Matt's dog, Bear, with them now. He's rigged up with a camera and light, and runs around the houses making his own videos for his own channel, Beeper Bear.
He didn't act any differently to usual, in what was supposedly a highly haunted place. In fact, Bear's only been freaked out once while exploring, and that was because he discovered someone hiding under a bed.
It was also a rare occasion when he actually barked. For several explores afterwards he was noticeably less adventurous, and stayed closer to Matt and Andy.
In another house he stood motionless in a larder staring at a wall for half an hour. However, he's a terrier, and rats had been spotted in the piles of rubbish in the adjoining kitchen.