Above the Law: Paranormal scientists deserve open minds

When anyone mentions something supernatural, most people automatically think they have lost their minds. Try it. Go up to someone and start talking to him or her about aliens or spontaneous human combustion, and see what kind of reaction you get.

The fact of the matter is there are phenomena happening all over the world, all of the time, that people tend to dismiss for one reason or another. Only recently, with the upsurge of programs like "Ghost Hunters" and shows like it, have people begun to see some of these happenings in a different light.

I believe we all have a curiosity when it comes to the unexplained or supernatural. It is in our nature to want to learn about things we do not understand fully. Today, we understand much of what the humans of the past did not because of the technology available to us.

To me, the supernatural is the "holy grail" of things we do not understand, because all of these things have to do with us as human beings directly. There will be more questions from the answers we get, but great strides of progress are being made.

There are scientists and researchers who spend their lives dedicated to studying these phenomena, and who have done us all a great service for sharing this information. Unfortunately, they do not always get the academic credit they deserve, because their peers in the scientific community sometimes consider them "crackpots" for studying things they themselves have dismissed as not being worthy of scientific investigation.

Think of your own reaction to these types of things, and see if you have dismissed UFOs, crop circles, ghosts, demonic possession, stigmata, psychic ability, and a host of other unexplained phenomena as hoaxes, trickery, hallucination, or old men with boards crushing plants into shapes in the middle of the night.

Would you respect someone who researched something you have dismissed like that?

It is because of these scientists and researchers though, that we can now begin to learn about what is going on with ghost activity and other supernatural happenings. Perhaps after reading this article, you may be a little more open to the concept that these phenomena are worth looking into and deserve a little of your attention.

The only way you can ever know whether you should believe or not is to go look into the research and science that has gone into these fields. As a skeptical person, I take some of the information with a grain of salt, but if you look, there is solid evidence for all of these things I have mentioned.

We may never know all of the answers to the questions we ask ourselves about things that go bump in the night, or those strange lights in the sky that break the sound barrier without making a sound, but these scientists and researchers are at least helping us understand these things, rather than fear them.