"Phony perhaps. Baloney, perhaps not."

-Bela Lugosi (from the movie The Black Cat)

Leave it to ol' Bela is perfectly sum up my own attitude toward the paranormal. Sometimes I really don't know which way I feel or think about the subject. There are many claims made which sound silly and, upon closer examination, turn out to be extremely silly. Then there are the reports that are quite preposterous and, the more one looks into it, very hard to either explain or forget.

I once had some neighbors who were convinced that they had a ghost stalking their attic. They described every spooky sounding stomp, scratch and squeal of some strange entity that routinely scrambled across the attic floor. In fact, they described these ghostly hauntings so well, that I realized that they had squirrels in their attic.

Many hauntings do have such equally banal explanations. Some do not.

I once talked to a woman who had been stationed by the U.S. Army in England. She lived off base in a quaint little house that had been recently built on what had use to be a parkway in the village. The parkway had been very popular with people walking their dogs. So popular that an elderly gentleman who had been deceased for a few years still took his dog for a daily walk and routinely came in through one kitchen wall and out the other. The first couple of visitations she found disturbing, but after awhile got use to it.

Some tales are just out right ridiculous. Some are not. And quite a few are in between. It is my fondest hope that over the years I have at least learned how to tell some of the differences.

There are certainly some basic rules that I have learned and that I strongly adhere to. These are my general guidelines for studying any claim of the paranormal.

A. Most eyewitnesses are seriously trying to tell you what they believe to have seen, heard and felt. Often, the core description is reasonably reliable. It is their interruption of what they witnessed that becomes tricky. They can report the basic perceived "facts." It is mostly their attempt to explain what they have observed that gets all balled up into their own predetermined notions. This is sometimes called analytic overlay.

B. The vast majority of people involved in paranormal events are extremely sane, quite normal and rarely have been indulging in any legal or illegal substances. The kook, crackpot and weirdo theory just doesn't hold.

C. Extraordinary claims DO NOT require extraordinary proof. This favorite chant of the debunkers (which was not coined by Carl Sagan) is simply anti-scientific rubbish. The whole point of science is that it is a great leveling force. All claims, no matter what they may be, must pass the same standards of proof. There are no exceptions to this anywhere in the history of scientific theory and methodology.

D. You can indeed fool some of the people some of the time. Charlatans, con artists and those who tell tale tales depend upon this and have an amazing ability to wheedle their way with bogus claims and stories. We call them bullshit artists and you always have to be on the watch for them.

E. Likewise, you can fool all of the people some of the time. These people are called "debunkers." Many debunkers have a scientific attitude but a complete lack of scientific training. A good example was the late Philip J. Klass. He had a perfectly respectable career as a technical writer and editor, but he routinely made a pretense to levels of scientific knowledge that he simply did not possess and often invented bogus scientific claims that were even more bizrre than the UFO sightings he kept trying to disprove. Klass had a near religious belief in ball plasma and its capabilities for chasing farmers across fields in the middle of the night.

Debunkers often exhibit a blind faith in 19th century Newtonian physics and seem to be waging a long lost crusade against the post-Einstein age. In some ways, I have a slight sense of sympathy with them. I have only recently allowed myself to accept that we live in a so-called "multiverse." Personally, I don't like the idea. It strikes me as kind of messy and complicated and the whole idea gives me a headache. Unfortunately, the multiverse doesn't care if it gives me a headache.

F. Never try to explain a mystery by invoking an enigma. This is a bad habit of folks from the "New Age" persuasion. I once was part of a panel on crop circles that was largely dominated by someone explaining how the circles were formed by aliens using their superior vibrational planes to open new channels of consciousness yada yada yada. The guy didn't have a clue what he was talking about and none of it made any sense and it was all based upon papering over one unexplained event by referring to a boatload of inexplicable notions versed in the language of pseudo-mystical mumbo jumbo. Much like the multiverse, this too gives me a headache.

Finally, there is the one rule that is the most important. Don't worry about finding the right answer. Sometimes, it just isn't about finding the answer. Often, it is really about discovering the right questions. I seem to recall that the ancient Greek philosophers said the same thing, only in a much fancier form.