In 1790, the idea that meteors actually fell from the sky was regarded as a superstitious delusion. By 1805, it was accepted by the scientific community as an indisputable fact. It ’s hard to think of any other paradigm shift which has ever taken place this quickly and conclusively. True, there have been theories which were damned for decades before their eventual acceptance (continental drift), and creatures whose existence has gradually crept from myth to fact (the gorilla, the giant squid). But never before or since has an entire class of physical phenomena made this unequivocal journey from heresy to orthodoxy.

As such,the meteor controversy is the most significant precedent for the work which thousands of researchers have undertaken on dozens of ‘parascientific’ subjects for the last hundred years or more.