Basic Guide to Proving Your Theories

by Christine Bruun

1. Formulate your theory based on your experiences, impressions and information gathered.

This may sound easy but it isn't. It takes many hours of research and information gathering to be able to formulate a theory that has credibility. The information you use to back your theory must be credible.

2. Set about to prove your theory by gathering pertinent information and data that confirms and validates your theory.

Now that you have your theory, what now? This is the difficult part. You must prove your theory using all the information you have gleaned, and present it in a manner that will be acceptable to the most adamant skeptic.

1. You first must organize your information and research into categories--not just subject categories, but categories that rank it according to degree of validity based on fact and evidence.

Example: An unsubstantiated sighting will have less validity than a hair sample or a dropping collected from the site. However, a collection of sightings may weigh more heavily than a single sighting.

You must sift through the evidence and the reports to find a common thread that will lead you to your theory.

Once you have discovered the common thread, you must use your information to weave a believable story that takes you from one point to the next, from one bit of information to another, all the while creating a strong, sinewy path that ultimately leads even the most naive reader to the same conclusion you have reached.

3. You must present your theory to your peers and to the general public for review.

This is the most difficult of all the steps in proving your theory because presenting your theory to your peers for review is like an author sending in a manuscript to a publisher. You must be ready for the rejection slip to arrive.

The most important thing I can tell you is, don't take the negative personally. Everyone who has ever had a thought or an opinion on this subject will be ready to rip you to shreds. It goes with the territory.

However, it does more than open you up to rejection, it provides an opposite point of view for you to bounce your theory off. It opens the subject up to debate and that is healthy. This debate provides a backdrop from which you can re-evaluate your own theory and place its validity against all the other theories out there. It provides another point of view that you might have missed because you were so focused on proving your own theory.

Some people will be sharp and cutting while others will take a softer stand. However, if, (after it has been dissected, quartered, and looked at through a microscope), you still hold to your theory, then it does not matter what others say. What matters is what you think.

4. Having presented your theory to peer review, you have nothing left to do but continue to gather and evaluate the ever present evidence and to continue to look in the direction your theory takes you, for a theory is just that, a theory. And it remains just a theory until it is proven wrong by facts or science.

Until that time, you are neither wrong nor right, you are just thinking and evaluating--and it is that process which will sooner or later bring about the truth.

And remember, there have been a lot of good scientists that were scoffed at until their theory was proven to be true. That is just the nature of the beast.

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