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"If we're interested in what's true rather than what just feels good, we will demand very high standards of evidence." -- Carl Sagan
"We are not here concerned with hopes or fears, only with the truth as far as our reason permits us to discover it." -- Charles Darwin |
Let's face it.
It's a big world out there, and it's full of many things
that science can't explain; if it wasn't, then science would be out of a job.
Science, after all, arose out of the need to explain the unexplained. But let's
face this also; the vast majority of events and occurrences that popular press
and media claim are scientifically unexplainable, are not... unexplainable,
that is.
Matters are confused by researchers and investigators
grouping these strange stories into broad catagories --- UFOs, ESP, ghosts,
etc. --- in an attempt to understand them. More confusion is caused when the
same researchers and investigators make the mistake of putting forward inventive
and far-reaching theories to try to explain some particular grouping of these
stories that are believed (but not proven) to be related; and often these theorists
make the further error of "explaining" the unexplained with the unexplained...
asserting that ghosts can be explained as a form of telepathy does nothing to
clear up either subject.
The reason it is a mistake in most cases to put forward
these theories is the same reason most scientists avoid studying these strange
stories, a reason given above... most of the stories being theorized about are
not true, a simple fact that brings any theory based on these stories into
definite question. Before useful theories can be put forward to explain the
unexplained, we must know what occurrences really are unexplained. Some
things happened; some things didn't... and investigators need to know which
is which.
This may sound a bit simplistic, but no one is seriously
attempting to sort these stories out as far as I can tell. Believers take many
stories on faith; sensationalists have no good reason to ask if a story making
them money is true or not; and skeptics will often bend facts to make everything
look perfectly explainable... even if it's not. It's the rare few who will simply
examine all the facts around a story objectively with no pre-chosen opinion
they want to prove.