EXAMPLES OF COMMON FALSE ASSUMPTIONS AND CONCLUSIONS related to extraordinary phenomena Index

If there's not scientific evidence of something, it doesn't exist. Sounds reasonable. But what is "scientific evidence"? And who is to say whether there is such evidence or not? When we talk about the scientific evidence of rare, extraordinary phenomena, how many people actually 1. have access to the evidence 2. understand the scientific value of the evidence 3. are willing and/or allowed to make the evidence public - and all of these at the same time? If there's evidence of a phenomenon that fits the concept of traditional science, it is enough that information of this evidence is published in the media, even though most people are likely not to understand the scientific foundations of this evidence. Yet, if evidence of something "extraordinary" is published, it is usually publicly claimed as false or misinterpreted. This is very easy to do, because very few people can be supposed to have access to the evidence, and the people that do can be discredited too by powerful authorites! Sometimes it is also rather unscientific to say that something doesn't exist just because there is no KNOWN scientific evidence to support it. Many scientific discoveries surely have been made so that there was something that needed to be explained and then the evidence was looked for! If something doesn't make sense, it can't exist. Make sense to whom? To the person who makes the claim, to the scientific community, to mankind? Are we to believe that we have the intelligence and knowledge to understand everything that goes on in the universe? Many people have said it makes no sense to think that Crop Circles are made by alien creatures, because they wouldn't make their message so difficult to understand, or they should make their patterns in more public places. This kind of opinions are of course based on an assumption that the possible aliens have to think and act in a way similar to us. Just to think that the Crop Circles HAVE to be messages for peope, is a sign of extreme self-centeredness from our species! Hearing something from several sources verifies information. If identical information comes from several independent sources, we might have a tendency to see this as a guarantee of reliability. In some cases this might be the case, but it's possible that these sources, although not having any contact to each other, might be "echoing" a single source of information - which may be false! It is very difficult to be absolutely positive about the truthfulness of any information that comes from other people. In the end we will just have to look at the big picture and learn how to recognize and look for the correct info.