Where’s the evidence for the alleged Phenomenon? You’re treating it as if it’s a real thing but it’s no more real than Adamski’s photograph of a UFO was. None of us can prove a negative, and no real evidence the Phenomenon, what you describe as a persistent, intelligent force in the OP, even exists. Quite honestly, the Phenomenon just sounds like the beliefs of a UFO religion like Heaven’s Gate, the Raelians, or Scientology.
I think on the whole, mainstream science routinely makes a much better job of doing that, without breaking a sweat, than the paranormal community ever has done.
That phrase “high strangeness” is quite a coinage. By giving it such an attractive name it reifies the concept for our minds. I mean, when you put it that way, a person wants to know more.
My personal take is to go, “Hey, check this out. High strangeness. Isn’t that something else? How about that?” without attempting an explanation. Just… taking it all in. This is called phenomenology, a sort of intellectual palate cleanser.
I personally get more out of sheer wonderment at what a weird existence it all is than trying to persuade skeptics that I know the explanation for it. I’m a fan of the film Picnic at Hanging Rock, the point being sometimes there is no explanation, the universe is just stranger than we can imagine (as a famous scientist once said). I know someone who likes everything neatly wrapped up, who hated Picnic at Hanging Rock because there was no explanation. I loved it for the same reason.
OK, but let’s clarify something.
I’m not saying “the Phenomenon” is proven. I’m saying the pattern of high-strangeness and unclassified aerial encounters has been persistent enough, and consistent enough, to warrant real scrutiny, even if it doesn’t fit cleanly into traditional scientific frameworks.
We’re not talking about Heaven’s Gate or Raëlians here. This isn’t about belief in a savior species, it’s about acknowledging that some events, tracked by multiple sensor platforms and documented by trained observers, remain unresolved. That doesn’t make them aliens. But it does make them interesting.
And if there’s even a 1% chance that something external, intelligent, or non-human has interacted with our environment in a repeatable, observable way, shouldn’t the scientific default be to investigate, not mock?
If it’s just psychological, cultural, or neurological? Great we learn something meaningful there too.
But dismissing the question because it sounds religious is, ironically, just another form of faith.
Sure, but let’s separate bad signal from the question itself.
Adamski isn’t “proof” of the Phenomenon, but he also isn’t disproof. He’s just early noise, part of the mess every field goes through before it matures.
Frauds exist in medicine, too. That doesn’t mean we abandon biology.
The Phenomenon,as described,isn’t built on faith. It’s built on recurrence:
Incidents recorded across decades, across cultures, and increasingly across instrumented platforms (infrared, radar, satellite). Most can be explained. A small set? Not so easily.
And no, that doesn’t mean aliens. But it does suggest we’re seeing something persistent, whether it’s a real intelligence, a deep psychological effect, or an unknown part of the environment itself.
What I’m arguing for isn’t belief.
It’s engaged skepticism, the kind that doesn’t throw out hard-to-explain data just because frauds like Adamski existed.
If you need 100% proof to keep looking, you’ll miss every signal that isn’t already familiar.
Science doesn’t grow that way.
And maybe it’s time we asked why this keeps showing up instead of why it hasn’t gone away.
Let us clarify it even further: Almost nobody is asking for proof, and you haven’t even provided actual evidence.
Exactly. Sometimes the most honest response is just to sit with the weirdness and let it breathe. Not everything has to be solved, some things just need to be witnessed. And yeah, Picnic at Hanging Rock nails that. The absence is the point.
Using a fictional book and/or movie, Picnic At Hanging Rock, as an example of what you claim is a real phenomenon really doesn’t cut it for me, sorry.
What I have seen is that they investigated Adamski more and found that what he used was not the top of a hen heat coop, but recently it was found to be a Sears lamp cover.
Leading to more mockery.
No, really, thinking that while investigating one is forbidden to mock is not realistic when evidence tell us that other explanations are more likely, what happens some times is that when researchers do confirm strange things the mockery stops.
The problem for the proponents of fortean things like UFOs, is that more often than not, the results of further investigations leads in reality to… well, more mockery.
So, as for Investigation and Mockery, these two things don’t exclude each other.
Hell, I can answer that in five seconds. Because people want to believe.
NOT because people want evidence.
NOT because people want to investigate.
NOT because qualified people have not thoroughly combed through the proffered data.
NOT because what’s left has any meaning other than that it does not provide sufficient data to say anything at all about it.
NOT because a total absence of evidence equates to evidence that something must exist.
Because people want to believe that the entire history of science, all the collective advances “recorded across decades, across cultures, and increasingly across instrumented platforms,” must be thrown out in favor of mystical nothingness that lie outside of all the science that undergirds the world and allows people to communicate on an internet message board. Because people want to believe that science can investigate something that they insist lies totally outside of science. Because people persist in the gauzy notion that the undefinable can be defined, the intangible can be touched, and the meaningless can be given meaning if only you believe in it strongly enough, as withTinker Bell.
What positive evidence you present is exactly equivalent to the oft-presented and equally oft-investigated and therefore oft-debunked evidence for ghosts, the afterlife, telepathy, magic, astrology, homeopathy, and a thousand other passions that lie outside of known reality. Exactly equivalent. That they are endlessly repeated with the mantra “it gets repeated so there must be something there” gives believers the one slim reed they can cling to, and maybe hope to convince skeptics that their phenomenon is somehow different from the snake oil peddled by thousands of crackpots, frauds, and charlatans. It isn’t.
If anything is there to be investigated it will be investigated. In fact, it is undoubtedly being investigated by someone knowledgable right at this moment. No matter how many times you have denied that in this thread it remains true. If anything is found it will be made public at some point. If nothing is found … well, then nothing will change, will it? People who want to believe will continue to believe even harder because the truth is out there.
And they’re right. The truth exists. Right here. Believe it.
They could have at least gone with Roadside Picnic, it not only explains the unexplainable and aliens, and spawned a movie, on top of that it created a whole video game genre. And reveals the truth behind Chernobyl, which hadn’t even happened when the book was written!
Exactly this.
Many people want to believe that there is something greater and more fantastic than their ordinary lives, and that “something” helps to give them an explanation and meaning for the vagaries of life, and maybe a way to achieve some level of control over their reality.
Traditionally, that was mostly what religion provided, but all of these supernatural things come down to being a matter of belief, and a (maybe subconscious) desire to see what you hope to see in a phenomenon, and an unwillingness to accept “mundane” explanations for what you see and experience.
Also, this “The Phenomenon,” as the OP describes it in their original post in the thread, reads like a Grand Unified Theory of Woo.
If only docs would stop treating the symptoms of these interconnected maladies and get at their Root Cause.
You can sign up for my Root Cause Detox Protocol. It’s totally worth it. 
Totally fair to call out wishful thinking, that’s real, and it does warp perception.
But I’d argue there’s a difference between believing without evidence and noticing persistent anomalies and refusing to label them prematurely. The fact that something doesn’t yet yield to current methods doesn’t mean it must be mystical, it might just mean our frameworks aren’t fully equipped yet.
Not saying “the truth is out there.” Just saying: sometimes the refusal to look becomes its own form of belief.
I’ll agree that mockery has a place, especially when someone’s clearly staging hoaxes or selling snake oil. Adamski deserves mockery. Most fringe claims do.
But the risk isn’t in mocking bad data. It’s in letting those examples set the tone for every anomaly, even the ones that don’t fit so neatly into fraud or error.
All I’m saying is: investigation should come first. Mockery should follow failure, not precede inquiry. Otherwise we’re not doing science, we’re protecting consensus.
Are you seriously claiming that science doesn’t investigate?
That’s all science does; the problem is that other people don’t want the explanation to turn out to be mundane.
I get the point and yeah, projection and narrative bias are real. People do reach for meaning when things feel chaotic. That doesn’t make them wrong, just human.
But calling something a “Grand Unified Theory of Woo” kind of misses what’s actually being explored. It’s not about finding a cosmic answer to life, it’s about asking whether certain persistent anomalies deserve to be categorized, catalogued, and tracked without getting lumped in with frauds or fantasy.
If it’s all noise, fine. But we don’t dismiss noise we analyze it. That’s how we found the signal in the first place.
IME, when there’s mockery of supernatural claims, it’s when either (a) actual scientific research has provided mundane explanations, which the proponents refuse to accept, or (b) proponents provide “scientific evidence” which proves to be junk science (or completely made up).
No, I’m not claiming science doesn’t investigate. I’m saying we should notice when mockery becomes the default tone before the investigation even starts, especially in areas that challenge existing models.
Plenty of legitimate inquiries do happen, but they’re often filtered through frameworks designed to confirm the mundane. That’s fine, until it blinds us to the small percentage that aren’t easily filed away.
It’s not about avoiding mundane explanations, it’s about not preloading the conclusion with ridicule. That’s not skepticism. That’s just cultural inertia
It is built on faith. You claim that THe Phenomenon is responsible for all these incidents. What evidence do you base that claim on? If there is any evidence, you have not presented it when repeatedly asked to do so. We must conclude that you have no evidence and are basing your claim on faith.
You admit “Most can be explained”. If that is true, why look for a further explanation of them?
What is this “small set” you mention? I (and I assume other Dopers) want names, dates, locations, details and data. You have not provided any of that either.
Who in this thread has done that? I own copies of Fads And Fallacies by Gardner and Flim Flam! by Randi. I have not gotten around to reading them because I only got to unpack and shelve some of my books two weeks ago. Even James Randi said “If I throw a hundred rain deer off a cliff, I haven’t proven that rain deer can’t fly. I have only proven that none of those rain deer could fly.”
You seem to be railing at straw men.