Making sense of the paranormal

[rashore]

Quote

Researchers from various disciplines are seeking not to debunk strange events, but rather to understand how people engage with them, and what this reveals about the human experience.

Blinking orange lights cut across the night sky over Shag Harbour on October 4, 1967. Witnesses in the small Nova Scotia fishing village then saw what seemed to be an object crashing into the water. Fishermen and, later, authorities went out into the Atlantic to seek survivors. They saw some yellow foam bubbling on the water’s surface but no wreckage.

Newspapers reported on this strange sighting, the government investigated, and soon enough the incident was nearly forgotten. Then, around the time of the new millennium, a few books and documentaries started to come out about “Canada’s Roswell” (a reference to an incident in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947 that conspiracy theorists believed was a UFO cover-up). Now, the legacy fuels a mini-economy: the town has the Shag Harbour Incident Interpretive Centre and holds an annual festival that draws UFO enthusiasts to revisit the strange story, and to talk of aliens and government complicity.

https://www.universityaffairs.ca/features/feature-article/making-sense-paranormal/

 

[Podo]

This is an interesting article. I tend to agree with the broad strokes approach to what it is saying; how people interact with the paranormal is just as important as whether or not the particular paranormal thing in question is real. That sasquatch can not possibly be real is irrelevant in light of the sociological phenomenon that sasquatches represent. I'm sure there is plenty to be learned sociologically or anthropologically from studying those who experience and study the paranormal. While the entities are almost certainly not real, there is clearly something lurking in the human psyche that creates the same sightings, century upon century.

Also, it's nice to read something about Canada for a change! So many articles like this are foreign.

Edited February 23, 2018 by Podo