One of the many communities I belong to on social media is dedicated to the MISSING411 phenomenon. This, if you are unfamiliar, is the field of expertise of a man named David Paulides, who investigates cases of strange disappearances in national parks and other wilderness areas. Most of the people who belong to this group are supporters, the folks who buy Paulides’s books and watch his videos. Every so often you’ll get a skeptic, probably just trolling. There are some legitimate skeptics, though, who’ve looked over Paulides’s evidence and found it lacking. They point out the scarcity of those cases that genuinely are anomalous, point out that the vast majority of cases of disappearances can be explained by “rational” means. They’re right, of course. This is hardly anything we don’t know, with “we” being all the non-skeptics. (I am a big advocate of skepticism, but the kind practiced by these skeptics tends to be skepticism to a fault, which can skew dangerously close to closedmindedness.)
What such skeptics fail to realize, though, and this applies to cases of the paranormal in general, is that, while 99.9% of reports of alleged supernatural activity *can* be explained away, if one does some investigating, it’s that .01% that fascinates. It’s that .01% that is everything. And the actual number of incidents that make up that .01% is larger than you might think.
Check out Paulides’s work on his website.