Here's the question to ask: why wouldn't you investigate such things?

"Oh, because I know it's not real," you reply. Really? How do you know this? How do you know without testing it, at length?

OK, maybe you're comfortable because many claims to these things have been debunked in the past. Fair enough. But then you find out the Soviet Union, your sworn enemy who is always looking for a new technological breakthrough, is dumping huge amounts of research money into these topics. What if they know something you don't?

Well, it turns out they didn't. But you can hardly blame the intelligence agencies for "mirroring" the work that was done abroad. And the modus operandi of the classified research establishment was (and still is), "it's worth spending money to find out whether some 'impossible' thing is possible or not, because the costs of it not working is a few million dollars out of your secret budget, and the costs that come if it does work and you didn't invest in it could be massive" (Cf., Sputnik shock).

At its core, your use of the word "weird" is what needs to be examined, though. What you mean by "weird" is, in the terms of historian and philosopher Thomas Kuhn, that this "does not fit the paradigm you are living within." Which is fine. But if you're worried about your paradigm potentially being wrong, then you can't judge things as weird. You have to take leaps.

To put it into perspective: my engineering students find Newtonian concepts of gravity intuitive. They don't have any problem with an invisible force that draws mass to mass. They find Aristotle's concept of gravity, in which mass is drawn to the Earth because that is its natural affinity, "weird." Fair enough, I guess. But here's the rub: my students are wrong, by about 100 years. Einstein's concept of gravity is that it is a fictitious force: it is the movement of mass along the shortest possible path in spacetime, but spacetime is warped by mass. Is Einstein's gravity "weird"? Only if you think Newton is intuitive. Everything's weird unless you think it's true. (And for what it is worth, in Newton's day, people thought his concept of gravity was "weird" to — specifically, they accused it of being "occult," which is to say, they thought the concept of an invisible force looked a little magical and unscientific. But it worked, so it became less "weird" over time.)