Usually, to this category belongs people who, although in possess of little, if any, knowledge of scientific subjects, points at the academic world and whimpers at its point of view - insensitive as it is to the secrets still held by Nature.
The results of such attitude are well known to the few that instead decide to be devoted to cryptozoology in a serious, scientific way.
First of all, this discipline keeps being considered as a trivial monsters hunt; thus, most of the books, websites, and blogs on the subject are full of nonsense and news reported without even the simplest common sense.
The latest example of such attitude comes from the website of Craig Woolheater, and it's about a piece of news titled "Vermont trail cam captures photo of bigfoot?". Its content incredibly doesn't report any comment to the ridiculous image showed as hypothetical picture of the bigfoot, but the fact that a radio talk-show has revealed its existence just a little time ago.
For now I won't say what the picture effectively shows, but I will only describe what the boobies have believed or wanted to see...
A bigfoot stooped to pick up his whelp! Beyond the controversial image and the blurred and incomprehensible enlargement of a detail, the website of Mr. Woolheater doesn't add anything else but a laconic "You can read the details behind his investigation of the photo, along with Dr. Bruce MacCabee's analysis of the photo at the SquatchDetective website."
It's useless to point out that the link brings us to some delirious pages in which a funny man crawls in front of the trail cam to show that the subject that has been shot, the alleged bigfoot, is a lot larger than a human being...
Pareidolia: to see what you want to see.
The term "pareidolia" indicates the instinctive tendency to perceive known shapes in irregular, blurred, or not well defined images. A classical example is to look at the clouds in the sky and see shapes such as birds, dragons, or castles.
Even for what concern the alleged bigfoot, the pareidolia - coupled with the total lack of zoological knowledge, played an important role.
According to these "researchers", the picture would indeed show the head, the back and the arm of a bigfoot stooped (maybe to pick up its whelp).
Copyright: http://squatchdetective.com
And there's certainly no need to have great zoological knowledge to notice that the subject shot it's an owl, probably diving on a prey.
The wings, tail, head and back of the animal are clearly visible, as well as the fact that the object doesn't stand on the ground and it's close to the camera, thus giving the illusion of being larger than it is.
If the level of cryptozoology popularizers will keep this trend, then how can you expect that this discipline could ever have the attention it deserves from the academic world?
