The beauty of science is that you don’t have to “believe” in it.
Please note that I don’t mean to say your anecdotal experiences can’t be interesting, just that they can’t be used as science until you do the work to actually prove that they aren’t just your experiences.
And you still believe in this paper because you didn't reproduce it yourself or you didn't see it being reproduced step-by-step in real life, you rely on this scientist who conducted the experiment reporting it legitimately and other scientists involved in peer review process to have actually read the paper and verified it through reproduction (which isn't all too common in academia btw.)