Meaty said:
Hit me. I know that a good amount of all that stuff is fake, but still you gotta consider some facts and evidence that is very credible. I also I find it stupid whenever someone thinks that soemthign like the Loch Ness monster is a single creature. If any cryptozoological animals are real, they would be a whole undiscovered species, or maybe a rare mutant animal, the latter much less likely.
Well sure, that's why I took it very seriously for a long period of time.
I have a lot to say so I'm just going to ramble.
First off the big main problem is the best pictures/film is always blurry, the best personal accounts are always only spoken.
Even for those being honest about seeing something, it's easy to notice something when you're aware of the potential. Being at Loch Ness sure is a convenient place to notice anything weird in the water.
Feel a cold breeze on your shoulder, see something vague out of the corner of your eye, or hear weird clomping sounds in your house during the day? Whatever. Happens at night? GHOSTS.
I know occasionally people on those specials will do some extreme amount of sonar detection/(something scientific-y related with the crypto thing) and come up with some sort of kinda-interesting point or two. But there's a few things to consider:
1. They don't "really" know what they're doing/talking about. I know this sounds like a cop-out reason, but it actually does happen, especially with the non-professionals using technology we can't be sure they fully understand or can relay the results back without inputting their own bias.
2. Even if they do give us something kinda interesting the evidence never pieces itself together in a way that would give it scientific credibility. People get different piles of evidence that they typically jump the gun on coming up with, and if these end up being potentially interesting finds they never cross-verify each other, otherwise we'd have some sort of case.
I used to always wonder when watching these shows and seeing how the discovery channel has to struggle to put a team of four together, why don't we get huge teams of real pros on this stuff? It's because pros have gone over it long ago, probably many times, and every time come to the conclusion that their is not sufficient reason to believe anything is happening. People who come up with evidence aren't being scientific and ruling out more likely explanations, they are thinking with the mindset "Anything good I find is evidence of this probably". You HAVE to rule out the more mundane explanations first. People deliberately lie, mistake things, large "unidentified" figures in the water are "unidentified" and can be multiple things, etc.
Also those documentaries and stuff deliberately play up the likelihood to make the program more interesting. I always thought the ones where they didn't say this stuff had a chance of being real to be disappointing. Honestly, 90% of the time all you have to do is google something they're telling you and somebody has a very good potential explanation for what's going on.
http://www.theskepticsguide.org/
If you're really interested in hearing the other side of arguments like this in general, I HIGHLY recommend giving this podcast a listen - and to keep with it if you don't like their negativity about some things at first, because they always eventually cover a topic appropriately. (Also it's a good podcast for cool science facts n stuff.)
