Q: Why doesn’t the paranormal community police itself better when it comes to scientific rigor and fraud? In many areas—including ghosts, cryptozoology, and UFOs—it seems that pretty much anything goes.

—B. Baker

A: This question hits on one of the key issues in critical analysis of mysterious and paranormal claims: Why—despite enormous amounts of time and effort over the course of decades with the benefit of increasingly sophisticated technology—is solid evidence of ghosts, Bigfoot, UFOs, psychic powers, and other such phenomena still conspicuously lacking? Paranormal proponents have long blamed others for their inability to provide good evidence. When conspiracy theorists, for example, are asked where proof of their claims is, they often roll their eyes and sputter that of course they can’t provide evidence … because it’s hidden by those in power; the fact that they don’t have evidence of the coverup is itself evidence of the coverup.

The same happens in psychic research. Believers often resort to a special pleading fallacy called the “sheep/goat effect”: When skeptics are watching, psychic powers inexplicably vanish, dim, or (in the context of lab experiments) drop to levels predicted by random chance. James “The Amazing” Randi, for example, was especially adept at blocking Uri Geller’s psychic abilities by his mere presence, and demonic spirits seem to carefully avoid possessing or haunting skeptics.

Occam’s razor suggests instead that Shakespeare was right: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars.” If these phenomena are genuine, real, and amenable to verification—that is, not the product of myriad factors such as mistakes, perceptual and memory errors, hoaxes, misunderstandings, and so on—then there’s no reason solid evidence shouldn’t have been found by now. Researchers are simply incompetent and need to bring scientific rigor to the search, because what they’ve done so far has clearly failed.

Time and again conclusive evidence (of Bigfoot, extraterrestrial contact, psychic powers, etc.) is promised and fails to materialize, following a predictable pattern. First, a non-scientist or layperson claims to have discovered some important piece of evidence. News media then pick up the story, sensationalizing it in the process. Then, as public interest mounts, the original promoters promise that scientists will examine the evidence and prove their claims. You might think that the next step is that scientists examine the evidence and then hold a press conference to announce that the phenomenon has finally been verified.

But instead, the claims just fade away. Sometimes the evidence turns out to be hoaxed. More often the evidence is not faked but instead simply ambiguous and inconclusive. Nothing comes of the story because nothing can be determined from the evidence. It’s just another footnoted failure in the annals of paranormal research, and few believers seem to notice that the footnotes greatly outnumber the text.

One serious problem is a lack of scientific rigor. To pick one notorious example, there is no consensus on what ghosts are—even among ghost hunters and self-proclaimed experts—and many of the explanations are mutually exclusive. A ghost cannot be both a sentient earthbound spirit and a hallucination; nor can a ghost be some sort of stored emotion (i.e., stone tape theory) and a malevolent, mischievous spirit. These theories must describe entirely different phenomena. If ghost experts don’t have enough known, independently verifiable information about what they’re studying to distinguish between a hallucination, a “time slip” from another reality, or a sentient spirit of the dead, the field is in far worse shape than anyone dared imagine.

There’s no central authority making any attempt to hold evidence to any scientific evidential standard. In scientific research, there is some semblance of gatekeeping (imperfect as it is), partly because researchers are held professionally accountable for mistakes. For example, if the editor of a top medical journal publishes highly dubious (or even outright hoaxed) research, he or she can expect significant opprobrium, including calls to resign. There is no analogous position in Bigfootery, ghost hunting, or other paranormal research. A handful of journals attempt to impose some scholarly standards on the research, including the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research (1884–present) and Cryptozoology: Interdisciplinary Journal of the International Society of Cryptozoology (1982–1996). But most of what passes for paranormal research appears in blogs, New Age books, and social media posts with little or no quality control or outside input (much less skeptical commentary).

There is very rarely peer review in these fields, due partly to the prevalence of self-described experts (see my column “Paranormal Qualifications” in the November/December 2013 SI). Many paranormal “experts” are reluctant to openly challenge or criticize others for sloppy research and inflated or irrelevant credentials for fear of inviting the same scrutiny: “How dare you question my methods? I’ve been looking for Bigfoot for fifteen years and wrote a self-published book on it, while you were only a featured guest on Season 5 of Finding Bigfoot!”

The TV series Ghost Hunters was popular in part due to its alluring premise that anyone can be a ghost hunter. The two original stars were ordinary guys (plumbers, in fact) who decided to look for evidence of spirits. Their message: You don’t need to be a scientist—or even have any training in science or investigation—to look for ghosts; all you need is some free time, a dark place, and a few cameras and gadgets. This message inspired tens of thousands of people to pursue paranormal “investigation” but failed to convey the caveat that looking or hunting for something isn’t the same as scientifically investigating it. Basic principles of research design—so fundamental to basic science and valid results—are barely acknowledged in ghost hunting and other paranormal fields.

Mistakes, inconclusive evidence, and outright hoaxes are so routine in these fields that they’re barely notable. It’s only the occasional high-profile, extraordinary fiascoes that make national news and embarrass these fields (examples include the infamous alien autopsy hoax and Melba Ketchum’s self-published “Bigfoot DNA” research, which had been rejected by scientific journals). For every one of these cases, there are hundreds of similar, lesser-known ones that rise up and fade away among the research communities. Proven hoaxers often circulate in these communities many years after their shoddy research and hoaxes were exposed. (I’ve heard Bigfoot researchers say, “Just because he faked one video doesn’t mean his others aren’t real.”) Despite decades of this, the problem never seems to spur alarm or sufficient recognition among believers that their inability to police their field is fatal to their credibility and dooms their field to perpetual pseudoscience.

It’s very frustrating to both skeptics and science-minded believers to have no quality control; it’s a huge, self-imposed impediment that undermines the perpetual complaint that “scientists and skeptics won’t look at the evidence.” The fact is that scientists and skeptics do look at the evidence, but you have to provide them with good evidence. If you’re making a claim—especially an extraordinary claim—then you need to offer good evidence for it. Generating spurious mysteries is very easy (an anonymous eyewitness sighting; a blurry photo or video of something in the sky or in a forest; an apparent “extra” face or body in a crowd, etc.) It’s not the skeptics’ job to sort through the mountains of mistakes and hoaxes to find any valid evidence. To return to the Wild West analogy, the citizens of Fortville need to organize and deputize themselves to keep out the con men and drunks instead of expecting the (often unpaid) skeptical sheriff to maintain order.