◆ PARALLAX

I'll close this out with one observation, which is: a thing being real does not require that we believe in it.

The legends we study are real because people in real communities believe them, not because we add our belief to theirs. Our job is not to believe. Our job is to document, to question, to trace provenance, to hold the line against our own wanting.

The Blair Witch made us want. It made us want to believe in mystery, in the unknown, in the fragility of our understanding of the world.

That wanting is part of us. It's part of why we do this work. But we cannot let the wanting override the discipline.

And we didn't, not entirely. That's enough.