Making sense of the paranormal

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.youtube.com/watch?v=AFh5dbIdrMo&feature=emb_title

This is more than just a quirky moment in Canadian history, but a rich vein of human experience that Noah Morritt, a PhD candidate in folklore at Memorial University, is mining for his thesis. He’s looking at Cold War politics, the evolution of the UFO legacy and the impact on locals, particularly devout Baptists. “It reveals the importance of tradition in community, and how we make sense of the world around us,” says Mr. Morritt.

He joins a growing but still relatively small group of researchers examining how people interact with the paranormal – UFOs, alien abductions, crop circles – things “beyond the scope of normal scientific understanding,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary. These researchers are not, in the main, out to prove or debunk the existence of such incidents, but rather are trying to understand what people do when they encounter something that they don’t … understand.

Sounds flaky, right? For “serious” academics, this might even be viewed as outside the bounds of legitimate inquiry. That would be a shame, says Paul Kingsbury, a professor in the department of geography at Simon Fraser University. Writing for The Conversation Canada, he notes: “enduring skepticism in the social sciences about the legitimacy of the claims about paranormal phenomena and experiences has resulted in a lack of critical studies on how people are actually engaging with the paranormal.”

These researchers contend that thinking differently about, and not judging, paranormal claims can yield important insights. “Can we discount an experience because it’s out of the ordinary and strange? I don’t think we can. We need to ask hard and critical questions about it,” says Mr. Morritt.

Those critical questions reveal pivotal issues around community, belief, tradition and knowledge. Ignoring the odd and unexplained has kept us from understanding some of the basics of the human experience, he says.