Roughly 80 percent of practicing witches and psychics are politically liberal with 55 percent being “strongly liberal,” according to a new survey published Thursday.
This “Politics of the Paranormal” survey polled 1,756 attendees at UFO and paranormal conferences in the U.S. and found that the biggest group of conspiracy theorists were left wing. The seven-month survey asked attendees to identify as either conservative, strongly conservative, liberal, strongly liberal, or none of the above
Nearly 40 percent of those surveyed self-identified as “strongly liberal” and a little under 10 percent being “liberal.” However, the conspiracy theory community is heavily polarized, as roughly 33 percent are “strongly conservative” and another 8 percent are “conservative” with roughly 10 percent identifying as neither.
The only major group of conspiracy theorist represented who were conservative were “Bigfoot Hunters.” The most politically non-aligned group at the conferences was “UFO aficionados,” 30 percent of whom had no strong political preferences.
Researchers behind the survey admit they were surprised by these results.
“Conspiracy kooks were commonly believed to lean right politically,” states a summary of the research in Journal of the Bizarre. “Yet, when you stop to think about the most popular conspiracies of our time, from the JFK assassination to the 9/11 conspiracy, these conspiracies were championed by liberals.”
Liberals aren’t the only people to believe in psychics however
A Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) data dump contained 1,864 instances in which the agency seriously investigated psychic phenomena, including the use of psychics by law enforcement, research with the Pentagon, using psychics to spy on the Soviet Union and attempts to debunk scientists skeptical of psychic powers.
CIA scientists even tested celebrity psychic Uri Geller in 1973, but the agency’s research into psychic powers does a lot more to prove its shoddy research methods than it does to demonstrate the actual existence of psychic phenomena
The CIA’s scientific investigation of psychic power likely indicate that any science that heavily relies on statistics may have a powerful “placebo effect.” Researchers are able to “remember the hits and forget the misses” simply by repeating testing until it produces “experimental evidence” that meets typical scientific standards for statistics purely by chance.
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