Published: September 27, 2007

From the first sighting of Bigfoot in 1840, to Mothmen terrorizing West Virginia in 1966, to chupacabras caught in south Texas in 2007, there have been a surprising amount of “mythical beast” encounters for such a rational society in which we think we live.

For many people, it’s not enough to just believe in the extraordinary—they must take the extraordinary out to dinner, buy them drinks, invite them over for a movie, leave before they wake up in the morning and never call them again.

A strange event simply will not be recounted without observers’ exaggerated descriptions and the desire to be a part of a new chapter in hundreds of years of folklore. It’s just human nature to focus on desired details and blow things out of proportion. After all, no one can say that even Americans do things half-assed—let’s cite some examples:  the Salem Witch Trials; McCarthyism; the War on Terror.

What makes the average person see everything that goes bump in the night as a ghost, lights in the sky as an alien invasion or a burned grilled cheese sandwich as an appearance of the Virgin Mary?

Is it the ordinary, humdrum life that most of us will inevitably settle into? A life of mortgages, bratty kids and white collar work? Or is it the certainty that science will soon render all mysteries as electrical signals, carbon emissions and tricks of light? Or maybe it’s the intellectual community’s growing trend toward skepticism, which ostracizes people who carry faith in God, open-mindedness toward unexplained incidents and curiosity about the intangible?

Let’s face it: it’s more exciting to imagine we live in a world full of undiscovered legendary creatures, miracles and paranormal phenomena than a world of mutated dogs, false eyewitness testimony and coincidence. If the ever-scientific Dana Scully had been right even once in the “X-Files,” no one would have watched the show (the name of the show would then have to be changed to the “Party-Pooper-Files”). It is the unrelenting existential search of Fox Mulder that furthers our desire to believe in the world of mystery.

Life should—and will—always hold some enigma. There may be strife between a doubting Thomas and a fundamentalist Christian, but no one can deny that society will lose something rich and exciting when the search for the Loch Ness Monster, Holy Grail and Dracula ends. I just hope we don’t lose too many lives when the war between vicious mutants and Fordham students begins.