Anyone who spends much time laboring in the vineyards of psi, even an armchair investigator like myself, becomes aware of the vast number – the truly extraordinary number – of claims that have been made throughout history, and continue to be made today, of miraculous, bizarre, unexplainable phenomena. Every kind of strangeness has been reported by apparently sober witnesses. There is a whole field of study, Forteana, which involves collecting such reports, which easily run into the tens of thousands.
To me, the existence of this mass of material is a bit unsettling. It suggests three basic possibilities, none of which is very palatable. The first possibility is that these weird claims are true, in which case reality is bafflingly and perhaps frighteningly strange. The second possibility is that these claims are false, in which case there is a great horde of otherwise normal people who believe things that are, in fact, crazy. This, too, is rather bewildering and scary; it means the human race is largely insane; psychosis is rampant; we are surrounded by nuts, and may be nuts ourselves. Then there is the third possibility, the one I personally find most likely – namely, that some of these things are true, and some are not, and a great many occupy a wide swath of gray area, an ambiguous borderland where the labels "true" and "false" are not easily applied. And this is, in some ways, the most disturbing prospect of all, because it suggests that we can never be quite sure what is real and what isn't. We can make educated guesses, we can say that one case seems valid and another seems bogus, but we can't really know and we could be quite wrong.
For instance, I am personally convinced that ESP – telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition – is a real phenomenon, and that most people have modest ESP talents while a few prodigies have exceptional abilities. And I think that some mediums have conveyed messages that are most probably actual communications from the deceased. But I have a lot more trouble accepting the idea that some mediums can materialize walking, talking dead people in the séance room. And yet I have to admit that if the world is as strange as it sometimes appears to be, then the inherent strangeness of this claim is not necessarily a strike against it.
I remember a discussion on this blog some time ago, in which it was pointed out that some mediumistically materialized entities, when photographed, look like crude rubber and papier-mache dolls, the kind of props that could be smuggled into the séance room and assembled in the medium's curtained-off cabinet. This seems like strong evidence of fakery – but (someone pointed out) what if ectoplasm really does look like that when it materializes? What if the crudeness of the physical manifestations reflects the lack of control exercised by the spirits or by the medium? As I understand it, a recent book by a physicist named Jan W. Vandersande makes precisely this point. (I have ordered the book but haven't read it yet.)
But … if this is true, then how can we ever judge any such phenomena to be phony? If even the crudest manifestations can be seen as legitimate, then it would seem impossible to debunk any materialization medium. So we are left in a gray area, not knowing what to believe or how far our "open-mindedness" should take us. We are in the territory so well charted by George Hansen in his classic book, The Trickster and the Paranormal.
Many of the more bizarre areas of paranormal investigation – areas shunned even by most parapsychologists – include cases that are well-documented and apparently legitimate, yet simply too hard for most of us to accept. Perhaps this should give those us who are sympathetic to psi some understanding of the position taken by skeptics. We all have our boggle threshold, the point at which almost no amount of evidence is going to be persuasive. The principal difference, possibly, is that the skeptics' boggle threshold is lower than ours. If so, it is a difference of degree only, not of kind. And I'm not sure we should judge either ourselves or the skeptics too harshly for having a limit to what we can believe. Our understanding is finite; it is good to stretch our boundaries, but it can be dangerously destabilizing to stretch them too far.
Increasingly the world looks to me like a place that our minds cannot hope to encompass, even in principle. That doesn't mean we should stop looking for answers, or even for some "theory of everything" that will explain it all. But while there is merit in looking, there may be reason to doubt we will ever find all that we seek. As the biologist J.B.S. Haldane memorably said, "Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose."
Maybe so.