Ludicrous

Mark Stout reads Putin's mind: he was referring to psychics reading Madeline Albright's mind, when he referred to hearing about foreign interest in Siberia.  As everyone knows, psychics are ridiculous, ergo, Putin is ridiculous.  A political pundit has no need of a nuanced understanding of parapsychology.

Someone with an interest in parapsychology has no need of a political pundit.  They can investigate phenomena themselves, and with others.

It's been shown that crowd-sourcing rubes can be just as effective as consulting experts.  It might even magnify psychic powers.  Hunter Lee Soik has developed an app called Shadow, intended for use as a dream journal, but conceivably useful as a seismometer for keywords in the precognitive unconscious.  A larger sample of users would be necessary to see if it works as such.

Making scientific breakthroughs through experiment and discussion occasionally entails a certain amount of risk, and the possibility that one will appear ridiculous.  Academics and scientists do not like to appear ridiculous.

A petition was signed by hundreds of scientists around the world to prevent the University of Mumbai from hosting a single session of the Indian Science Congress, the subject of the session being descriptions of flying vimanas in ancient texts.  As everyone knows, the portions of mythology that don't correspond to modern expectations are unequivocally the religious fictitious bits.  As such, science can't benefit from discussing what doesn't exist.

If you don't look, you'll never see.  If you know something can't be, you'll have a harder time observing it.  Conventional channels are not conducive to finding new perspectives.

Raquel Cepeda recounts for the Personal Journeys section of the New York Times exactly how to see UFOs:  "You [have] to open yourself to the ludicrous, be a fool, so to speak, to have faith, in life and in love."  The New York Times has printed the secret, if perhaps only online, and there is no way to debase that with irony.