Belief and Skepticism amongst those who believe crazy things

Lately there have been grumblings in various places about some guests that Billy and I have had on our show. Some people can't abide the fact that these witnesses report paranormal events happening. Many of the skeptics regard these witnesses as outright frauds. One offending moment came when our last guest, William, aka Bipedalist, said that his photographs kept showing what are called orbs, and a strange ecto-mist. Later he said that some creatures he encountered could make light beams come from their eyes.

Granted, these are strange things to hear. I wonder, though, why we often can't hear the experiences of others without a kind of knee-jerk reaction of contempt and ridicule? Just as an example, and with no wish to pick on anyone, here's the kind of reaction I mean. A listener and BFF forumite wrote the following in a thread about the radio show (the emoticons don't transfer over, but their file names do):

William, aka bipedialist,..............what a crock! You owe me 90 minutes of my life back!

Orbs and ecto-mist, wacko.gif icon_really_happy_guy.gif ...............how about moisture droplets, smears and glare on your camera lens.

I knew your crypto statements about "your bigfoot experience" on this board were pretty lame new_whistle.gif ........... thank you for proving it on this show. wink.gif

I suppose your next tale will have you "habituating" one!

Later the commenter goes on to say:

Pretty neat, a bigfoot that lights up the trail with "white cones of light".

Your'e not a member of the MABRC, by any chance, are you? blink.gif

I want to draw your attention to the sarcastic attitude in the message. The attitude of disdain for unusual experience is worth marking for this reason -- we know that ridicule is a form of social control in human beings. We use ridicule to push behaviors and ideas that are not socially acceptable to the fringes. It is hardly necessary to mention that what is considered socially acceptable is not necessarily what is true. Humans have a very uneven record so far as socially constructed truth goes.

I'm not going to beat up on this commenter, or anyone else, for their reactions. I've already mentioned here how very hard I found even reading about cases that combined one paranormal category with another in my younger days. Ridicule was never my style, but you can be sure I'd have marginalized Bipedalist's experiences in my own mind had I learned about them then.

We cannot know what caused Bipedalist's experience. Not even Bipedalist knows that. But I have experienced enough in my lifetime to know that people have very strange experiences. I know this because I have had them. I understand that not so many other people have. The trouble is, without any direct connection to the strange, how can we wrap our minds around it? How can we expect others to?

I'm often amused at how insular the various "fringe science" and esoteric categories are. UFO people laugh at bigfoot people, who laugh back, while both laugh at ghost hunters, who are laughing all the way to the bank. It gets a little ridiculous when you think about it. A bioacoustician, Elizabeth von Muggenthaler, once said, speaking of a Vermont lake monster,

This just doesn't belong in the same category as crop circles or a Sasquatch sighting. It needs to be treated as real. You don't want to minimize the scientific importance of this.

Lake monsters, real! Bigfoot and crop circles, unreal! How silly we must look to those who don't believe in any of it. (And, lest you think it is just us, take a look at this post on UFO Media Matters, dealing with the internecine war amongst UFO skeptics of the nuts and bolts variety versus their version of the paranormalists.)

The world we live in is a very strange place, and we know next to nothing about it. Not too many centuries hence, after humanity has gotten itself out of the rut it is in now, we as a species will look back at this time and see it as a kind of dark ages of thought and science. So many things we don't understand, and so many avenues of data we close off reflexively, out of, I believe, an irrational fear of the unknown. There are already avenues for understanding the apparently paranormal, and I've pointed some of them out here on this blog. One day soon, I believe, we are going to understand how paranormal things happen. And then they won't be paranormal anymore. We will find that there is a rational, scientific way of understanding these experiences.