I’m from Wisconsin and I can confirm. Sounds like Wisconsin activities.

Well sure but I don’t do percentages. Things are either explained or they aren’t. But forgive me for sounding evasive because of it. And also you’re dragging a lot of things into this. Luckily fringe science is my jam.

Also I would like to start by making a distinction between fringe phenomenon and fringe ideas. It should be obvious but since the skeptics love to poison the well by lumping all manner of things together, santa Claus, UFOs, conspiracy, theism, ghosts. Bigfoot, flat earth, etc. as part of their propaganda. Phenomenon are things experienced in our shared reality. They are not the ideas about things. And since we’re defining words; fringe is an expression of cultural acceptance, not rarity. Some fringe phenomenon are very frequently reported. And even though flat earth is a popular fringe idea, it is not a fringe phenomenon. Important distinction.

I think that there is no denying that the most obvious explanation for most phenomena is because people experience them. I don’t think these people are mistaken, or have false memories, or lying. It would be a great affront to epistemology (and science) when we start denying experience a priori. I don’t, in fact I like a phenomenological and fortean approach, and I think the skeptics make a metaphysical mistake.

So, let’s start with the skeptic, and I classify them as metaphysical naturalists with unwavering adherence to scientism, immediately search for an object in the world. Since this, in their worldview, is the only thing that exists. Experience, in this world view, is a direct consequence of the object. Experience without object is immediately and swiftly denigrated to the land of illusion.

So let’s look at a list of things that has strong skeptic denial, scientific taboo but strong cultural presence… Miracles, afterlife, ghosts, higher beings, telekinesis, mediumship, etc… These things (many more) have as a common thread that they are experiences of either non-objects or non physical intelligence. The list is getting shorter all the time, (meditation, hypnosis, acupuncture, placebo.) even when they are still without any physical explanation and hinge almost exclusively on belief. And to be abundantly clear, belief is not an object.

Okay, so while a skeptic can say… ‘Ah no object, no real phenomenon. You are all idiots for believing in that shit’. I think that position is the laziest and most devoid of intelligence. (let alone within the spirit of scientific exploration. ) But of course without an object in our shared reality to point to I can not give you any information about the object. Also I can’t adhere to the rules set up by the naturalist approach to science. And I’m not saying this to as a get out of jail free card. I’m saying this to let you know that I have a deeper understanding of this problem than skeptics will claim.

There are many people who swoop in, claim everything is fake and swoosh away in a puff of smoke… Who are very aggressive about the protection of scientism and its worldview, they also kidnapped the cultural perception of science and what constitutes as intelligent discourse. They have actual magazines and focus groups, to keep the taboos in place. I can’t overstate the active nature in which these topics are denied and ridiculed. Seriously, it is rather extreme in some cases.

Of those, there have been exactly zero skeptics (and I’ve been around for a few decades) that understood that their beliefs were a direct consequence of their metaphysics. While in the intellectual philosophical discussion in that space there is an absolute immediate acknowledgement of the problem(s) of metaphysical naturalism that have been there since the start and nobody came close to solving for the past thousand years or so. Skeptics still double down on their position by gesturing at the fact that the same problem exists in physicalism, and that’s what every scientist believes. Reasoning in circles until they have buried themselves in certainty. So, if you’re searching for certainty that’s the camp that has it in spades, it’s unwavering and never questioned.

Anyway, the problem for me, for anybody who desires a scientific approach to the fringe phenomenon. Is that as soon as you accept that one of the things is true, the whole paradigm of physicalism and by extension m-naturalism can’t be upheld. There is no object, no measurable force in many of these fringe phenomenon. So there can only be indirect evidence of the phenomenons’ influence on the world, and in some cases only an influence on our experience. That type of evidence is certainly there for many of the fringe phenomenon. But it requires a lot of good quality evidence to be able to overcome the causal jump to an indirect influence. As you can hopefully understand.

I can tell you about my beliefs and certainties of all the things I read, but in the end for a lot of my beliefs about the fringe phenomena, the threshold for the causal jump differs from person to person. And there is, in most cases, no real established consensus. Yes, between the few scientist working on the topic . But these topics are complicated, nuanced, highly contested, extremely scrutinized and of course professional suicide. You have to actually and actively do your due diligence in finding the scientific exploration in the fringe topics. It is absolutely there and high quality scientific research is always being done. Despite all of the problems associated with the topics because there is in many cases something there.

Okay, so… There is a class of phenomena that are on the edge of physicalism, perhaps outside of it. Nevertheless are incorporated into mainstream. And clearly opening a path away from physicalism, (to subjectivism, idealism, whatever.) instead of the hard physicalism of metaphysical naturalism. I think this will just grow naturally as more and more scientific evidence is being found. The scientific method is the best at producing facts about the world. So to answer your question about how we can know what is or isn’t fact: Do the fucking science.

But actually do it, actually read it and search for it. Llet go of the bias inherently present in proceeding from a physicalism and especially m-naturalism perspective. The science that you can do when you’re not beholden to some religiously skeptical protection of what science can or cannot or isn’t allowed to do, is fantastic.

I implore you to for example go subscribe to JSE journal. It’s free (for past issues) and allows all topics. It’s wonderful.

Another free journal I enjoyed was ‘paranthropology’, although discontinued you can still find the publications online.

If you are interested in bigfoot in particular you can find interesting things over at sasquatch genome project.