"The more seriously you look, the more convinced you become of its reality, but the more elusive its origin, nature and intention become."

My dad Robert Mark Spearman wrote that, and I keep coming back to it. It catches the strange pull of this subject better than anything I could say myself.

Part 1 of his three-part series is live now, a clear-eyed, curious, deeply human look at something most people are trained to laugh off. And that laugh, he argues, is part of the story too…