by Karen Frazier, Managing Editor
Paranormal Underground e-Magazine

As I was interviewing world-renowned ufologist, Stanton Friedman, yesterday for the February issue of Paranormal Underground, I was impressed at his focus on the data. What Friedman says makes sense to me. He says there are many sightings of UFOs. A small percentage of those UFOs are genuinely unknown objects that are most likely flying saucers.

I’m not sure whether or not I agree with Friedman’s conclusions about the origins of the UFOs – I haven’t done the extensive data review that he has – but what I am impressed with is that he is willing to sift through the masses of data to find the relatively few examples that have credibility and possibility.

In my travels through the paranormal world, I’ve found that there is a ton of data out there. No matter what the phenomena, there are eyewitness accounts, personal experiences and more. A lot of it is, quite frankly, easily dismissed. Some of it can be proven to be explainable by some natural phenomenon. Often, the credibility of the witness is suspect. Sometimes, the experiencer is unclear as to what they actually observed, rendering the data obtained unusable.

Ultimately, in paranormal research, those types of cases amount to nothing more than noise that obfuscates the genuine, credible data. Unfortunately, it is the noise that the skeptics often focus on, arguing that the abundance of non-credible data renders all of the data worthless.

It is that kind of all or nothing approach that becomes an impediment to genuine discovery. Like Friedman, one must be willing to sift through all data in search for scientific truth. And there’s a lot of data out there to sift through.

The task is daunting, but ultimately worthwhile. If one genuinely wishes to pursue the truth, then one must be willing to sift through the mountains of data in order to uncover the tiny gems that hide in the rubble. It is there in which the possibilities lie.