I don’t believe in UFO’s. In fact, the whole idea of “Ancient Astronauts” being responsible for the pyramids and any other great achievement of ancient man offends me as an amateur historian and a human being.
Because, you know, IMAGINATION is only a recent invention.
I think psychics and mediums are frauds and scam artists. I think these people are the lowest of the low, using illusion and parlor tricks to prey on people in pain.
Loch Ness is empty of anything larger than an old truck tire and crop circles are, without a doubt, elaborate hoaxes. “Ghost Hunters” is, quite possibly, the most bullshit laden program I’ve ever sat through. I doubt most ghost stories that people tell me, understanding as a writer both how imaginative people can be and how fallible our senses (and our minds) are. I am, in short, a skeptic.
But I do believe in ghosts.
"Spirit Orbs" are still retarded, though.
An odd contradiction to be sure, but there is something about the idea of ghosts that clicks in my lizard brain, something about the fact that it’s a shared phenomenon across every culture with little deviation from the idea of what they are and how they behave. Leprechauns are strictly Irish, penanggalan strictly South East Asian, yet ghost stories permeate every single culture that has ever existed on planet Earth.
Growing up in the foothills of Appalachia, you tend to develop a peculiar taste for ghost stories. There’s a definite cultural aspect to it, generations of Scottish and Irish immigrants bringing tales of black hounds howling along windswept moors and phantom highwayman stalking the crossroads at night into the storytelling atmosphere that pervades the South. Surely there’s a geographic element to it. How can anyone live amidst those dark, ancient mountains on streets named for long dead Cherokee and Creek chieftains and not feel like something stands at the foot of their bed at night?
But I still think most people who do think they saw something at the foot of their bed did not. Maybe I’m an asshole like that, but to me the mark of intelligence is a combination of keeping an open mind while applying logic and a healthy dose of doubt.
Webster has a couple of interesting definitions for the word “skeptic.”
I had no idea he wrote a dictionary!
The two definitions I like are:
*a person who questions the validity or authenticity of something purporting to be factual
and
*a member of a philosophical school of ancient Greece,the earliest group of which consisted of Pyrrho and his followers, who maintained that true knowledge of things is impossible
Those two definitions perfectly encapsulate how I view “otherworldly” phenomenon. I question stories of encounters with anything that could be deemed supernatural, yet, like Pyrrho, don’t think that science is able to attain all the answers.
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