[tramav]

Are you sure that you are not the person in your joke: "The physicist John was constantly announcing on radio to let people show him a physical event that he cannot explain. He was a regular on radio and asked several times. Then one day he read this sentence on the internet: JOHN, PUT SOME WORK INTO YOUR RESEARCH, HE WHO SEEKS FINDS."?

[at_a_remove]

The line "Oh boy, I saw my fair share of lunatics and fanatics, I spend nights in haunted houses, with children whose parents claim they have telekinesis capabilities etc." suggests that much seeking was done.

[BrandoElFollito]

Yes, thank you for quoting. Way too much seeking, actually.

It was fun, though. You get to meet some very unusual people.

[yters]

Did you ever find some genuine inexplicable phenomena?

[BrandoElFollito]

No, despite being very open minded. I was a hard core physicist, but it would have been really cool to find something unusual (I did not have much hope, though).

Most people were in the category "I really saw it" and expected to just search "for that".

Some told that they or their relatives had special abilities. When I wanted to witness them they never happened, usually due to my "aura".

I spent a few nights in haunted houses. These were cool, the cracking at night was quite frightening. But ultimately it was not even B-grade horror (no slamming doors or anything). I saw rats once and this is what terrified me.

I met once an energothepeutist (he was "magnetizing" people's heads to cure them). It was on the radio, he came with a lady whom he cured. When he touched her neck, she collapsed. I asked him to touch my neck and make me collapse, he said it was dangerous, I told him that I officially agree to anything and take all the risks, he touched my neck ... (there is no music when you are on air, but the listeners do hear one, it was quite tense) ... I felt his fingers on my neck and yelled "aaaahhh!". He jumped 2 meters away. Of course I did not feel anything.

I particularly dislike the fraud kind (like the one above) who are putting people at risk (the ones that are sick and instead of medicine choose home - similar to the homeopaths). I was making special efforts to show how useless they are.

I had a lot of empathy for people who thought they saw something and wanted to understand whether this was true or not, I once met an old lady who thought that her dead husband was talking to her and I helped her to realize that these were various sounds in her appartement. She was really nice.

Unfortunately, many people will not believe anything even if it jumps to their face. This is BTW the same message I was being given by the ones that were showing me effects I could not objectively see or record.

One thing I did not agree to are "philippin healers" - they tell that they will extract your sick organs without you feeling anything. I did not want to do that because I feared that they would have some cutting devices under their nails (or something similar) and that this could get seriously dangerous.

[at_a_remove]

Although I only completed my undergrad in physics, we may have had similar trajectories. I have seen one inexplicable thing but it was rather nebulous. If that is all the supernatural has to offer, it was pants.

[yters]

The SRI at Stanford claims psi is very prevalent in the human population, but operates at low levels that require a large number of sensitive experiments to detect. Not saying they are right, but that could explain why these people were persuaded of paranormal activity, but it never popped out at you as a really obvious capability.

[at_a_remove]

That reminds me a bit of PEAR, which also held that the "level" is so weak that it requires massive samples to detect. If I recall, in The Demon-Haunted World Sagan mentioned it as one of the three "psychic phenomenon" concepts he thought that it was worth examining further, not because he believed in them, but because the usual mechanisms of science had not yet completely removed all of the confounding factors to reduce the results to mere noise.

[BrandoElFollito]

SRI International (no affiliation with Stanford since 1970) is a private company that does research for the US government and, later, private companies.

One of their activities was to look for paranormal activity. It all failed - see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parapsychology_research_at_SRI

It was abandoned in the 90's as there were no tangible results.