Fairy folk as scientific outliers

Outliers are strange data points. If you take a survey of how tall everyone is in your office, and you get a report that someone is twelve feet tall. That’s an outlier. Probably it’s a bad data, someone wrote down Fred is 72” tall and it looked like 12′ tall after coffee got poured over the paper. But good science says that we have a glance at Fred to see if he really is twelve feet tall before you toss out that data. Or as it says in the Wikipedia section on outliers: “Unless it can be ascertained that the deviation is not significant, it is ill-advised to ignore the presence of outliers. Outliers that cannot be readily explained demand special attention.”
So what if, instead of talking about how tall everyone is in our office, lets talk about what critters we see in the neighborhood. Lets see, dog, cat, cow, Bigfoot….Bigfoot?!? Yep we have outliers in the field of biology. They are called Cryptids. Some of these pan out, like Black Swans which were once thought not to exist.
So what about elves? What’s interesting about Elves is that just like Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster, people claim to have seen Elves. The reports are rare, definitely scientific outliers, and frankly some of them, like the famous photos that A. Conan Doyle pushed, are extremely questionable.
So, are there really faeries, dragons, dwarfs or mermaids out there? Probably not, but you don’t ignore outlying reports. You want to keep an eye on them. After all if it turns out that really was a mermaid dancing off the Coast of Israel recently, that’s important news.