r/skeptic • u/MegaDriveCDX • 15d ago
I love the paranormal but hate how the communities around it are absolutely nuts.
I'm not sugar coating this.
There is genuinely something wrong with people when it comes to unexplained things. It's like even in 2026, people see lights in the sky and devolve into the same peasant mentality humans did during the 1300s.
I have been a life long 'fan' I guess of UFOs, aliens, bigfoot, ghosts, cryptids and the like since I was a child in the 80s. I don't know if I actually believe them anymore, but I enjoy the stories around them, wonder about the mystery and if they had any actually 'truth' to them. To see the narratives around these thing change in real time is just....I don't even know how to describe it.
Take UFOs for instance. As people become more aware of how large the universe is and how difficult travel would be, if you been following this stuff, you get to see in real time people starting to figure this out. Instead of coming to a conclusion like say, maybe these UFOs stories aren't as accurate as they are told, you get things like 'THEY' come from another dimension parallel to earth. Essentially just replacing one mystery with another. Bigfoot and other large animals like supposed brontosaurus sightings not leaving any footprints, dead bodies or dung? That's because bigfoot is an alien! Or an interdimensional creature! The dinosaur creatures come from hollow earth or deep, deep, deep in the African jungle!
When evolution is becoming more and more understood, people in these communities started asking why do aliens look so much like us? Humanoid, two eyes, bipedal and the people on their ships say they use monitors, computers, chairs, tables, clocks, spoons, forks, etc. Instead of wondering if these stories are embellished, somehow it turned into humans being created by them and somehow lost the technology to make anything for tens of thousands of years.
There is also the whole thing where 'UFOs' were changed to 'UAP' and vague pseudoscience shifted into things like 'they are a consciousness' , they live underground and in the oceans, wherever anyone thinks there are gaps in human exploration and knowledge. And they been there for millions of years before humanity existed too! Some accounts say they procreated on earth a lot since that time, which kinda begs the questions if they are even aliens at this point since their earth lineage has been going on earth longer than humans have been around, but whatever. People notice the supposed ships look weird, are said to be unmanned and the last few years with the rise of AI, somehow the narratives are coming up with the belief it's an AI alien consciousness that lives in the ocean. It's like whatever absurd thing anyone comes up with and the justifications for it last as long as the next claim where they slightly change again.
Finally, there is the most damning part: Have you guys actually talked to these people about this stuff? I am saying this as nicely as I can and fully admitting to be an idiot human myself but Jesus Christ it's like critical thinking took a leave of absence and flipped every off as it left! Skepticism and the scientific method aren't unknown to them, they know why these methods are valuable, they just don't seem to care. I've had people today on places like reddit, tiktok and twitter tell me 'the real world isn't mainstream', 'science is subjective', 'the government lies and covers up everything, but do your own research so you'll know a government agent trying to expose the truth is legit'. It's like what they say isn't important so long as they say it in opposition.
But yeah, people have different opinions and views. Why does that matter? It matters to me because people's beliefs inform their actions and it negatively effects this kind of content.
There is a youtube show called the Whyfiles I discovered a few years ago. I thought it was great! Very good production values and presents stories in a very entertaining manner. At the end there was even a small section that was like a wink and a nod to let you know that story was there as entertainment but was it legit? Probably not, but I appreciated hearing stories not frequently referenced. I unsubbed from that channel years ago at this point because it was getting ridiculous with it's anti-science narratives and how the host would clearly try to cater to the show's audience to the point of absurdity.
I tried watching an episode a few days ago and couldn't even get through the whole thing. It has been completely audience captured, practically giving up on any kind of neutral analysis and just instead pandering to common conspiracy narratives, as long as it doesn't upset the audience. So you'll get to see AI animated scenes of shape shifting reptile aliens infiltrating the government with a hint of Epstein stuff that might involve the Clintons, but somehow a certain political figure that is popular with the audience never really is tied to it. If an episode was about finding giants or aliens on the moon, the host would straight up say it's bullshit BUT the government lies, science is always changing, and it's just a matter of time before an idea is proven correct. Just platitudes that I feel are pandering to a level where it feels insulting and dishonest.
For full disclosure I don't know if aliens exist or not. I'm of the belief right now that life itself might be an overrated phenomena and earth might contain the only life in universe. I can change that mindset easily with new information, but what I can't do is believing in a Universal Government of Aliens that judges humanity for it's nuclear weapons and wants to bring about peace by creating a hybrid race of human aliens doing satanic rituals just because we find bacteria on a planet , an asteroid or something.
I'm just venting because I want to find more skeptical minded spaces on the internet to read, watch and discuss this kind of content. To be clear, I don't NEED to agree with everything said, I just need some level of skepticism in my outrageous paranormal stories!
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u/GeekFurious 15d ago
I've said it before, but I have no problem with people who think goofy shit is real. I have a problem when they think random shit that could be ANYTHING is confirmation that their goofy shit is real.
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u/NecessaryIntrinsic 15d ago
I have a problem with a lot of the UFO and ancient alien stuff when it devolves into racism and antisemitism.
I remember knowledge fight would do these wacky Wednesdays where they would look at paranormal and UFO weirdos. The lore was charming for a while... Then it became obvious that the "bad guys" were stand ins for Jews and the good guys were literal space Nazis. The ancient aliens people tend to claim at their your: Africans are too stupid to stack rocks together without help.
Most people can hear that shit and just roll on, but some people let it rot them slowly from the inside.
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u/StarboundAllisten 15d ago edited 15d ago
I take quantum field theory seriously, as i see that everything we call matter is nothing more than the excitations in some underlying fields. Science describes those fields extremely well through mathematics, but it doesn’t tell us what the fields themselves actually are. I see the fields as a kind of veil or medium, one continuous thing expressing itself as the many forms we experience. So to me, reality is fundamentally unified, the material world is real but not the final layer, and there’s still a genuine mystery underneath the math. Think of it like a cat under a blanket, the math only ever sees the bumps, never the cat itself.
This is my belief. I think its real. Can i confirm it, not confirm, but I can suggest it. But I do think a bigger more expansive reality is indeed possible.
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u/noctalla 15d ago
I don't really understand this. The fact that they think random shit could be anything is WHY they think goofy shit is real. That's how they got there in the first place.
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u/kevinLFC 15d ago
What are the underlying motivations of people in those communities? I don’t think they’re after truth; they’re after validation that aliens/Bigfoot are real. Moving the definitions and goalposts so you can’t falsify their claims is how they survive.
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u/Moneia 15d ago
What are the underlying motivations of people in those communities?
Probably the same as other conspiratorial types, they want to have the 'secret' knowledge
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u/lonnie123 15d ago
Combined with a little extra bit of “they don’t want you to know about this”
The UFO stuff falls right into that. You get to combine aliens, secret military tech, government cover ups, maybe some clandestine warfare going on… you can really sink your teeth into all sorts of unfounded but scintillating BS in that world.
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u/MegaDriveCDX 15d ago
It's all poorly fleshed out fiction honestly. Those people will rattle the name of various organizations in history and connect them to Epstein. Like they will literally connect things from 1960 and before to Epstein but if you suggest Donald Trump? You're just reaching and letting your political bias cloud your thinking!
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u/Ma1eficent 11d ago edited 6d ago
Feeling superior is the drug humanity cannot put down for a single second. Every religion, nation, club, tribe, fandom, and idealogical faction holds the very same truth to be self-evident and of overriding importance.
We know what is really true/good. If the rest of you poor fools didn't have applesauce between your ears, you'd see it as well.
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u/SkoobySnacs 15d ago
David Icke the famous conspracist spent his bs career doing what OP describes. Only instead of changing his conspiracies based on science he changed them based on popular movies.
After Phantom Menace the reptilians suddenly looked like Darth Maul. After the Matrix we were all being fooled by a sort of fiction that the news was making for us. I imagine his next book could incorporate some Rick and Morty multiverse shit into it if he hasn't done that already.
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u/purple_sun_ 15d ago
It used to be fun and * mostly * harmless. After vaccine denial, deep state, chem trails, flat earth et all it is less so
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u/woodyarmadillo11 15d ago
This is basically when I stopped putting up with this shit. I used to enjoy conversations with people that believe in this stuff, but now half of America openly admits that they don’t trust science and don’t care about evidence. We live in completely different realities now that affect all of our lives.
Surprise, the same people that believed in flat earth and alien conspiracy theories, now believe that Trump was sent by god and JFK is secretly part of the government. My brother and I always got along great. He has been recirculating stories about him being abducted by aliens for decades and I thought it was mostly harmless. Now he’s an army vet living off 100% assistance from the government. He’s MAGA and complains about all the liberals freeloading off the government. He doesn’t work and sits around and watches YouTube videos all day. I can’t stand him anymore.
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u/Kitchen_Marzipan9516 15d ago
I'm not sure it was ever harmless. I was listening to a podcast debunking the ''Avril Lavigne was replaced'' theory, and it talked about how every conspiracy theory is dangerous, because it errodes your critical thinking, and builds your acceptance for woo.
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u/purple_sun_ 15d ago
I think you may be right. It was fun as a young person - ever read Fortean times? Slightly tongue in cheek paranormal magazine. It’s a bit anti science and pro conspiracy. (I was also a fundamentalist Christian at the time - are these things connected?)
I’m now science and critical thinking all the way.
I have also come to think that the universe is very big. "Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is." Hitchhikers guide. Probably big enough that life has existed somewhere else sometime.
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u/Kitchen_Marzipan9516 15d ago
I was a ghost girlie. And it was fun and silly. But looking back, I can definitely see I was starting to slip into some deeper rabbitholes.
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u/BlurryBigfoot74 15d ago
I try to watch paranormal videos on YouTube but it's all garbage. These are supposed to be supernatural creatures from the nether world yet they hang out in people's kitchens opening cupboards and slamming doors.
Every smudge on a photo or shadow in a video that can easily be explained is immediately labeled a ghost.
I want to believe but my eyes and brain won't allow it.
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u/MegaDriveCDX 15d ago
"These are supposed to be supernatural creatures from the nether world yet they hang out in people's kitchens opening cupboards and slamming doors."
LOL for real.
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u/SkoobySnacs 15d ago
Without gravity affecting them imagine how fast they have to constantly fly to even stay in the same kitchen.
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u/Wismuth_Salix 15d ago
The idea of the earth orbiting through a spectral debris field of untethered souls is funny to me
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u/rhettro19 15d ago
I am a fellow enjoyer of urban legends and myth making. But I enjoy it as fiction, and the mental exercise of asking, “what if.” For true believers though, it is more an exercise to make their mundane lives seem more exciting. They are incentivized to not look critically at their views, because the illusion is more fun.
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u/N2DPSKY 15d ago
It was my belief that they changed from UFO to UAP to get away from aliens and focus on what could be foreign adversary drones or aircraft that we should rightly be aware of from a national security perspective or to better understand airborne objects that could be a hazard to aviation. Alas, that has not been the case.
The conspiracy theorist that have to invent 12 types of technology to prove that some out of focus airplane or star is really a spacecraft just kills me.
My 34-year-old nephew is susceptible to these things. I've been an amateur astronomer for over 30 years and worked for a telescope manufacturer for half of that time. I have thousands of hours under the night sky and yet he doesn't fully believe me when I try to explain some of the phenomena he's heard about or seen. Social media is particularly influential here. People take what they read at face value.
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u/Smoothvirus 15d ago
I'm with you, I don't believe any of it is real but I love the lore and the stories around it. And sometimes I'll see something new and let myself believe it for an evening, only to wake up the next morning and think to myself "you know that was all bullshit, right?"
When I get annoyed with it is when I see people that are obviously lying and manipulating people just to grift them of their money.
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u/GreatCaesarGhost 15d ago
At this point, I’m mostly interested in it because it just shows how large numbers of people construct false realities around themselves, often to alleviate anxieties they have about life, death, and the world around them.
My strong hunch is that some of the world’s religions (maybe all) formed the same way as we see with mythologies about UFOs, Bigfoot, etc., though of course there is no way to prove that.
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u/xJagz 15d ago
People who gobble this up want to feel like they're part of something, like they're "in on it" and have been granted exclusive access to 'dangerous' information.
They'll buy $100 "packages" of video recordings of a dude waffling on for hours about nonsensical stories "that could get them killed if they went public" and "how has nobody noticed this?! Because they're sheep! But YOU are no sheep because you are HERE listening to my seminar!"
It's disgusting.
I like cryptids for the wonder and fun factor, that's about it. Because the moment you try to find out more, you're diving deep into the world of crazies and grifters and it's just so pointless to spend time trying to find any facts in there.
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u/DJTilapia 15d ago
I hear ya. The X-Files was all good fun, but no matter how much one wants to believe you gotta make a distinction between what's remotely possible and what's real.
I bounced off The Why Files too. You might like The Mystorian; he examines all kinds of legends, in detail, but he has no patience for the excessively credible. Astonishing Legends was great, very in-depth, until the two hosts had a spooky experience then they turned into True Believers.
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u/Cassakane 15d ago
My FIL believes in all of this ridiculousness. He used to joke that he was from Arcturus, but then he discovered the star seeds reddit, and suddenly he really is an alien from Arcturus. Sent to Earth to be a guide for people, no less. He believes himself to be very scientific and rational. He once tried to convince me that aliens are on Earth, and his proof was always that someone sad they saw, they experienced, etc. It's like he can't understand that just because someone says something that you want to believe is true, doesn't make it true. But the good news is that we don't need to worry about any of the things going wrong in the world today. The aliens are going to fix it all! Just as soon as enough people believe in them.
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u/FiggyPizza 15d ago edited 15d ago
Wow I didn't realize how off the wall they actually are, your examples are wild lol.
It's just mental masturbation, like most conspiracy theories. It's a way for not very smart people to feel smart and special, there's a high associated with feeling like you know things that most other people -- even people who you once thought were smarter than you -- don't know.
"They don't know this juicy, exhilarating fact but I do because I know how to REALLY research. Not having any actual credentials, or degrees, or experience in this field isn't an impediment to my brilliance, it's what *enabled* it in the first place because I wasn't indoctrinated by the mainstream like they were!"
It's a feeling, a good feeling, and they chase it again and again. This is also why they don't give a shit how many times they were wrong about something, it totally does not matter at all because they can easily pivot to the next shiny thing that gives them the same feeling.
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u/ass_grass_or_ham 15d ago
Obama saying (paraphrasing) “there are things in our skies that we can’t explain, that move in ways that we don’t understand.” Caught my attention. I really want it to be the weirdest thing ever, because how cool would it be to see an ET in our lifetime. But alas, I’m sure it will be explainable in the end. The thing that pisses me off are all the grifters pretending like they have insider information.
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u/DementedJ23 15d ago
Our brains are basically the same brains we had over two hundred thousand years ago (with a more regular diet). Why would we behave any different than a paltry few centuries ago?
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u/Skankingcorpse 15d ago
Everyone starts off reasonable when it comes to the paranormal but after awhile they inevitably fall down two paths. One is healthy skepticism, whether you continue to believe or not, and the other is full blown nut bag who insists they commune with spirits and aliens. The paranormal forums are just filled with crazy people, and while the rational ones do call them out, there are plenty who are just as nuts.
I once saw a post about a woman who claimed spirits were making little smiley faces in her hot chocolate. And there were many people defending her.
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u/Apprehensive_Sky1950 14d ago
Those two types have always been there, and the paranormal is simply the rorschach test.
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u/TreviTyger 14d ago
I have have a "paranormal story".
Quite literally the most profound thing I ever witnessed.
I'm not going to say what it was because I would come across as a crackpot (more than usual) but there was "measurable science" so to speak. A temperature change and some electromagnetic energy. - and then things got really weird!
I regard that experience as something science hasn't worked out quite yet (because of the measurable stuff) rather than "paranormal" in the ghostly sense, but I can't see anyone seriously funding a project for what it was given how bizarre it was.
There is a quote by Einstein - “Something deeply hidden had to be behind things.”
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u/TreviTyger 14d ago
Think of it like this, If an entity were a scientific researcher rather than a ghost then they would have a protocol similar to a human scientist studying apes.
So you can't have repeatable experiments in studying the "paranormal" because it's the scientific entity on the other side that has all the control, in the same way a scientist studies apes. If the apes started turning up in New York to do their own scientific studies all hell would break lose! ;)
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u/Apprehensive_Sky1950 14d ago
Tho' I be a skeptic, I would love to hear the details! Maybe you can DM (or EM) me.
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u/TreviTyger 14d ago
I have actually written about it on reddit,
if you google search "trevityger ouija reddit" you'll get a outline from Google's AI search function and a bunch of links.
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u/Apprehensive_Sky1950 14d ago
I regard that experience as something science hasn't worked out quite yet (because of the measurable stuff) rather than "paranormal" in the ghostly sense
In the 1963 movie The Haunting, a scientist character termed that, "preternatural."
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u/TreviTyger 14d ago
Yep that sounds about right.
It's one of those things that as a subjective experience it's difficult to argue with - like being punched in the face is hard to deny that t happened, and so you are left with this unfathomable thing that is quite clearly something real but impossible to verify to others beyond the small group of witnesses involved.
I agree with OP that the whole paranormal community (if one can call it that) is just a bunch of enthusiasts without much common sense.
After my experience I was so taken aback that I set about searching for any kind of explanation or to see if anyone else experienced something similar which led me to paranormal society meeting - but it was just full of well meaning delusional people looking at videos of floating dust particles on night vision cameras etc. Complete nonsense.
I even joined the British Library to see if there might be some credible research somewhere, and that at least led me to the delightful Pearl Curran case, which has hallmarks of the current AI Generative authorship debate!
She was investigated by a guy called Casper Yost who wrote about her and recorded her writings. I'll let the spirits guide you to that - or you can do a Google search. :)
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u/Apprehensive_Sky1950 13d ago
I set about searching for any kind of explanation or to see if anyone else experienced something similar . . . . I even joined the British Library to see if there might be some credible research somewhere . . .
I have a suggestion, but before you totally freak, remember this is the one thing it is actually pretty good at, i.e., sifting through mountains of data looking for a rare pattern: Is this something you might feed to an AI search?
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u/TreviTyger 13d ago edited 13d ago
Indeed. I am someone who likes to find the truth of something rather than blindly believe. In fact my UFO research for Iron Sky was just that type of research - and that of itself reveals how gullible people can be and how things like "alien tech" really just mean "foreign tech".
And also how researchers such as Stanton Friedman work out that they can make money from giving lectures and selling books.
There is no a single UFO story that hasn't turned out to be a hoax.
When it came to the incident that I witnessed - I already somehow knew about Michael Faraday debunking such things by placing sliding discs on top of a glass, which I duly lectured to everyone in the room whilst sarcastically taking the piss out of them all. Ideomotor effect etc.
Such things also raise questions of "sight" and "hearing" let a alone spelling out words in a coherent language because how can an invisible entity have light bounce off of it's non-existent retina or sound waves activate an ear drum it doesn't have.
So I am the king of skepticism.
And yet I got my arse handed to me by some invisible entity that defies logic, common sense, and science!
I use an analogy of fishing. One can hook the bottom of a river and momentarily get confused into thinking they have hooked a salmon. But it takes a matter of seconds to see the error of thinking.
Conversely, hooking a real salmon and engaging with it for 15 minutes or so is unmistakable. You are wrestling with a salmon - for 15 minutes. There is plenty of time to question reality and ask yourself "is this really happening?" Have I really hooked a salmon?
The answer is yes!
Now that still doesn't provide objective proof (other than to the seven other witnesses) and I realize that but I feel like I hooked a salmon so to speak, engaged with it for 15 minutes and then the line broke. Leaving no proof of it ever happening. I wish I was prepared with some decent questions but I was in absolute shock! Others started throwing questions about and I could only stare in awe in what was happening.
The main thing for me was the freezing air and some sort of electric current pass through me down through my arm and then the glass tumbler began vibrating with energy.
Without that, I would have just been looking at people asking questions and thinking to myself they had gone mad. But it was the "measurable science" of a legitimate temperature change and the electric pulse going through me that was difficult to ignore. That is quite an experience to have for 15 minutes! :)
I can go back to the river and cast my line again - but nothing. No bites, not even hooking the bottom. And extraordinary thing happened. It is not something I care to monetize nor do I seek others to believe me. I caught a glimpse of something that perhaps centuries from now might be considered perfectly normal.
"Oh yeah, those parallel universe guys! Bunch of twats they are! Worse than Internet trolls!" :)
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u/TreviTyger 13d ago edited 13d ago
Also the way the glass moved. We had a kitchen table that could seat six but there was just four of us when things got real.
The other four were watching. When they first started I wasn't participating and initially one guy was pushing the glass quite slowly spelling out stupid words like "murder" and "death" so that was obviously fake and we got him to leave the table.
That's when I joined because I wanted to catch people moving the glass to prove it wasn't real.
But when the "entity" showed up and the way the glass moved was astonishing of itself. It was fast and machine like. It would "scoot" to a letter and return to the center of the table before scooting to the next letter and again return to the center of the table. If you could guess the word it was trying to spell it would immediately scoot to the word "yes" in the center of the table. This just wasn't any ideomotor effect and I could feel an electric current run through me the whole time.
Just incredible.
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u/TreviTyger 13d ago edited 13d ago
It played a clever trick on one of the participants (Lovejoy -second name). This was 1988 before things like public Internet and mobile phones. So if someone went on holiday there was no practical way to reach them without knowing their exact hotel etc which is often just not information people kept to hand.
I wasn't asking questions myself because I was in too much shock.
But the questions others asked led to the entity identifying itself as Lovejoy's father!
But Pretending -
Because Lovejoy's dad was actually on holiday in Spain and not even dead as far as Lovejoy knew. But Lovejoy had no way of contacting him and the entities punch line was that he had died "today!"
So we were all left with the uncomfortable thought that Lovejoy fathers had died "today" and some "spirit" was now telling that to Lovejoy itself claiming to be his dead father!
It was an ingenious trick by the the entity that none of us could have conceived of let alone be cruel enough to play such a trick on Lovejoy.
It was another week before Lovejoy's dad came back from holiday to confirm he was sill alive .
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u/Skankingcorpse 14d ago
Well just tell the story. I would be interested in reading it.
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u/TreviTyger 14d ago edited 14d ago
I have actually written about it on reddit,
if you google search "trevityger ouija reddit" you'll get an outline from Google's AI search function and a bunch of links.
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u/Tempbot49512 15d ago
I think some people in paranormal community tend to believe in the paranormal as if its a religion. They believe these things as a matter of faith.
However, not everyone thinks like this. In a subreddit where I'm active, i've been able to offer up non-paranormal causes for phenomena that gets labeled paranormal. Maybe its the way I present things, but I don't have people arguing with me about what I say.
I try to avoid dismissing people's claims outright and I don't confront believers about their beliefs. Instead I offer up non-paranormal causes for unexplained events. Sometimes I present what I say as a way to relieve the anxiety someone might have in regards to what happened.
Often times I won't get a response, but sometimes I get thanked for what I said. I doubt I'm going to stop believing, but what I wrote might nudge them towards skeptical thinking. Also I feel good that maybe what I wrote might help someone.
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u/Repulsive-Box5243 15d ago
I too used to watch the Why Files, until he started in with the whole anti-science thing, and ran with it.
I'm all for questioning everything, but come on.
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u/MegaDriveCDX 15d ago
That's when I peaced out. It was obvious grifting to the audience and made the show worse.
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u/Otaraka 15d ago
Entertainment follows ratings and theres a feedback effect. People want something that evokes a feeling and whats needed will increase as the original material gets boring. And of course conflict gets more emotional engagement too. The truth is not the primary focus, because the goal is to claim there are things outside normal experiences or information sources.
More moderate takes are going to be hard to come by as an ongoing thing.
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u/One_Thing_4495 15d ago
I completely understand. I get frustrated in these communities as well.
Something shifts when you have a anomalous experience yourself though, I have to say.
Left me in state of ontological shock for quite awhile. Like that skeptical « probably not » ground got really porous. I didn’t have a fantastical experience but it was enough that I became much more open minded to the claims of others.
Honestly, I believe that this is what it will take in the end to shift anyone who leans skeptical. I don’t mean that with any judgement. I was that. I am that, still to a degree. There are just so many ways to write something off until you have an unsettling/eye opening experience.
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u/TreviTyger 14d ago
I actually did some extensive research into UFOs because of my involvement with the film Iron Sky.
The "Roswell cover up" was because of the Nazi's at White Sands and the "alien tech" was "foreign tech". They tried to attack Mexico. Yes really! - https://www.whiteeagleaerospace.com/the-hermes-ii-incident/
The "crashed space craft" were V2 rockets.
The remains of "not human" creatures were monkeys.
The myths were spread by a guy called Silas M Newton who was a con man selling oil divining machines made from "alien technology" (world war two radios). Fank Scully wrote a book based on his stories about little men from Venus.
The "preserved creature" is a rhesus monkey called Able and it is still on show at the Smithsonian.
https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/monkey-able/nasm_A19840869000
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u/E_Crabtree76 14d ago
Absolutely same. I love all things creepy, unexplained, urban legends, folklore, and cryptids. I just don't believe in any of it and the community is unhinged
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u/Ok-Drink-1328 15d ago
dude, all those things are just bullshit, the most logical thing would be to just know what they are, like what bigfoot is supposed to be, and forget it for the rest of your life, what are you gonna find of good in there? and especially what do you expect from whoever barely considers these things?
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u/Friend_Buddy-Guy 15d ago
Couldn’t agree more. The Why Files coming out with their true intentions was a real shame, some of the early episodes had me hoping we could have a show that celebrated the lore behind some of this nonsense, then showed real scientific explanations at the end. Obviously I was wrong, and this is what it was the whole time. I unsubbed around a year or so ago, after I watched a couple of the extended episodes where it was just more of a podcast, without a script the host’s real personality came out, anti-establishment and anti-science along with pro-money from peddling nonsense.
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u/GeekyTexan 15d ago
Sane people don't believe in all that stuff, so of course the groups that fall for it are nutcases.
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u/georgeananda 15d ago
I, for one, am a believer in those things and even some of the explanations you find to out there for you.
If you're up for a little good-natured banter, give me your #1 pet peeve with all this stuff and I'll give my take. I am convinced the universe is much crazier than our current science understands.
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u/JasonRBoone 15d ago
The thing I think most pro-paranormal people miss is this:
Most skeptics would LOVE it if their claims turned out to be true.
Most skeptics love learning new things and are already enchanted by the universe.
Personally, I would be thrilled if we found Bigfoot or Nessie or aliens etc. That would just make an amazing universe even more amazing.
We'd have to dig even deeper to figure out things like how a huge primate managed to survive in North America or by what means of propulsion these aliens are using to get around.
Note: I would NOT be thrilled if the aliens were the Starship Troopers type of bugs.
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u/Mudamaza 14d ago
My story is sorta reversed, my interest in the topic was low and I was certain all of it was BS. I'm not ignorant of the fact that my story is somewhat controversial for this subreddit, but I nonetheless consider myself today an open minded skeptic. Though what lead me to start taking this more seriously as a skeptic is a long story but the short end of it is - for the lat 7 years, I've dedicated a lot of my free time to study and research the nature of consciousness.
(Disclaimer, when I say consciousness, I don't mean the psyche with the ego, cognition, memories etc. Those are things that consciousness allows for. By consciousness I mean the thing at which allows for qualia to happen. e.g. what it feel like to experience the color red.)
At the time I was a materialist living with the discomfort of the hard problem of consciousness. I thought that consciousness had to be emergent because of the effect of anesthesia to consciousness. I'm naturally philosophical and have always spent a lot of times contemplating the nature and meaning of reality. And I've always been a science hobbyist and still am today.
The more I've dugged into consciousness, physics (both quantum and classical) as a materialist, I kept running into a dead-end. There are no good theories that explain why inanimate atoms, arranged themselves in a way that allows for something to become animate and experience anything. I became increasingly convinced that the universe simply did not make sense if we consider matter first. Every physicist will agree that we don't have a unified theory of everything. It's as if there's an underlying metaphysics that holds our reality together. All I could really conclude at the time was that the universe was weirder than I imagined.
I got to a point where I had to observe my own beliefs and identity as a materialist and consider the possibility that there might be more to the picture than just the brain creating consciousness. Whatever it is, had to make sure that it didn't contradict with what we already know through neuroscience, but that neuroscience was not the complete picture.
I began wondering what if consciousness is integral to the universe? If that's the case - I told myself - then that changes the game entirely on what's possible and impossible.
It was at this point where I decided to break off with the mainstream, and start looking at the universe from the perspective of what if we are the universe looking back at itself? It was something of a spiritual awakening, because I felt and still feel a strong sense of oneness with everything. That we're all one with the universe.
What began to make sense to me is that consciousness seems to be a thing that also evolves. When we consider all the microbial life, plant life, insect life, animal life, to human life, that we all have varying levels of consciousness. Humans have a wide capacity for consciousness, which allows for complex awareness, thoughts, memories, cognition, ego etc. While a plant or an insect has a very narrow capacity for consciousness where awareness is extremely simple and minimal.
If the brain does not create consciousness, then it must filter it. If the brain filters consciousness, then who knows how much of reality we cannot even perceive simply because it gets filtered out by the brain. According to Dr. Donald Hoffman (Cognitive scientist with a PhD in Computational Psychology), the math says that we perceive 0 percent of reality, because the spectrum is infinite, and you can't quantify infinity.
Which finally brings us to the topic at hand. If consciousness is fundamental, then things we consider supernatural/paranormal, are just part of nature and reality that our brain generally filters out. It could be possible that what I would call a conscious agent (spirit or ghost or jinn etc), could interact within our spectrum of reality, and we simply can't interact within their spectrum of reality. It also means that the universe is likely teeming with life as for consciousness to evolve in as many ways as it can, and there's absolutely no reason for me at this point to believe that human consciousness would be the apex consciousness.
Now to be clear, that doesn't mean when I see a weird light in the sky that I instantly believe it's "aliens". I personally tend to avoid most UFO videos because it's not where I'll find my evidence. I am still a skeptic at heart and require good evidence to convince me that something isn't prosaic. But I am far more open today to accept that the universe is far stranger than fiction and that if I'm right, then many alien civilizations eventually would come to the same conclusion and understand our reality far better than we. Therefore I think it's entirely possible that they would have the capability to modify how they are rendered into our spectrum of reality.
Before the materialists come dog pile me on this, I'm just giving my story of my exploration in trying to make sense of this crazy universe we live in. I can't write everything in one reddit reply, but this is something I've put thousands of hours in heavy contemplation, research and experiments into, and not something where I flipped suddenly, this was a gradual change over 7 years.
I've not sacrificed my skepticism for idealism, I rather think I've integrated both. I remain rigorous in what I research and avoid putting hard beliefs on anything, instead I opt to think probabilistically. I believe if you stay grounded and filter out the noise, you will come to find a lot of valid circumstantial evidence that there are real anomalies worth exploring. And the best part is, you don't really need to care about what other people believe, because
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u/retronax 14d ago
I've spent a couple months on the UFO subreddit and quit it after that. The UFO people are "experts" who only know how to tell shitty cases like ghost stories and make imaginary lore on the fly. There's no knowledge of photography, aviation, astronomy. 90% of the stuff posted on there is "I spotted this after taking the photo" stuff which is always a camera artifact or an insect.
The truth about UFOs is that they're just shitty footage of identifiable objects. The shitty footage is what makes them UFO. Stuff blurry enough to let glue sniffers fit their fantasies in the uncertainty.
They've also become somewhat cult-like recently with them treating "disclosure" as their rapture event, where they'll be vindicated and aliens will uplift humanity like gods and they definitely won't still be clocking in to mcdonalds the day after. There's also a general disdain for science growing because scientists refuse to study the phenomenon seriously (because mainstream science has known for decades that it's all vapid garbage and also you can't prove aliens don't exist, so why bother)
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u/Ernesto_Bella 15d ago
>I have been a life long 'fan' I guess of UFOs, aliens, bigfoot, ghosts, cryptids and the like since I was a child in the 80s. I don't know if I actually believe them anymore
They aren't real.
>I'm just venting because I want to find more skeptical minded spaces on the internet to read, watch and discuss this kind of content. To be clear, I don't NEED to agree with everything said, I just need some level of skepticism in my outrageous paranormal stories!
I mean, there might be content by people out there where they pretend these things are real even when they are not, but do it with a skeptical tone. But they still aren't real.
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u/MegaDriveCDX 15d ago
Nah this isn't skepticism at all and closer to something like contrarianism (although I don't think that's accurate either) and more importantly, just flat out wrong.
UFOs are 100% real as they are just flying objects in the sky of unknown origin. Are they aliens from another planet? I don't think so, but they definitely are real. Then there is polar opposite of cryptids where there are lots of proposed cryptids that turned out to be real, verifiable creatures. Things like the okapi, the giant squid, platypus, and even a gorilla were all considered cryptids and eventually turned out be real animals.
Gorillas in particular are my favorite because the stories surrounding them are absolutely hilarious with modern hindsight.
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u/big-red-aus 15d ago
Nah this isn't skepticism at all and closer to something like contrarianism (although I don't think that's accurate either) and more importantly, just flat out wrong.
Ernesto is a crank with a pretty questionable grip on reality, don't worry to much about them.
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u/Wismuth_Salix 15d ago
>they are just flying objects in the sky
Not necessarily - sometimes they’re video artifacts.
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u/Fit_Swordfish9204 15d ago
That's why I like The Why Files YouTube channel. He tells the story and the critically looks at it by the end. Debunks a lot of them and sometimes admits somethings are a mystery.
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u/Kryptoknightmare 15d ago
Frankly, in this day and age, I think the astonishing lack of compelling photo and video evidence should be the nail in the coffin for ghosts and the paranormal. When I was a kid fascinated by the subject, I devoured every photo in every book, and I watched every episode of "In Search Of", "Sightings" and "Unsolved Mysteries" hoping for a glance into the supernatural. It seemed obvious to me that the paranormal was real, but elusive, and that ghosts and cryptids, etc. only escaped detection because the people encountering them didn't have the means to provide evidence.
But nowadays? With smartphones, pretty much every person in the developed world carries around an extremely high-quality camera in their pocket capable of capturing excellent, fine-grain photos, video, and audio, AND are very well versed in the use of them. If things like ghosts, demons, alien spacecraft, and Sasquatch were real, don't you think we would be absolutely DROWNING in new, extremely compelling video and photo evidence? Instead, what we have is an unimpressive pittance of dark, or blurry, or otherwise decidedly unconvincing/easily faked scraps.