Where My Bigfoot At?

I want Bigfoot to exist.  Seriously.  I want there to be a Loch Ness Monster too.  And a chupacabra, and ghosts and gray aliens and a hollow Earth and... all of it.  I want every crackpot thing anyone's ever come up with to scare kids around a campfire to really exist.
   But I want a picture of it.  With it holding a newspaper. Or with it using an iPad.  Or with it strapped to a fender like a deer with a tag in its ear before it goes for processing and becomes Sasquatch sausage.  Which would be Sasquatchage.
  Have you noticed how there are far fewer claims of the paranormal in the last five years or so?  No UFO abductions, no Bigfoot sightings, no ghosts.  Nothing.
   It's because everyone has a camera.
   If you have a cell phone you have a camera.  Cops know this now, they assume they're always being filmed, at least the smart ones do.  In the good old days, with film cameras, you'd have all sorts of backwoods folks claiming to have been abducted, or to have shared a pot of beans with the Jersey Devil.  Nowadays, though, if someone makes an extraordinary claim, the first question everyone asks is 'where are the pictures?'  There are no more excuses, if you claim to have seen something out of the ordinary - say, a gray alien eating a Hungr-buster at the DQ - you'd better have a picture.
   As Carl Sagan said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.  And while I would dearly love to saddle up and ride the Loch Ness Monster, I'm pretty sure that's not going to happen.  Grainy, faked 8mm film isn't going to cut it any more, only HD pictures will do.
   You know what?  I think we're a little poorer for it.  I'm not sure anyone ever really believed in Bigfoot,* but absence of proof was not proof of absence, at least back before every American carried a camera in his pocket or her purse.  There used to be room for doubt, for the possibility however slight that you might one day come across a chupacabra caught in the act of chupa-ing some cabras.  I don't think that chance exists any more.  Too bad.  A little of the light of magic has gone out for us.
   I'm still holding out hope, though.  Maybe Bigfoot is just really, really, really camera shy.


*except for card-carrying weirdos, and even then I think they were doing it for the attention