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I’ve mentioned before that I’m a recent fan of the SCP Wiki, and when I saw the XKCD comic used for this troper article, I had to go off on a little bit of a rant. Yes, it’s harder to credit belief in the paranormal than it used to be, now that millions of people have cameras in their pockets. But it’s still by no means impossible to believe in such things.
For one thing, not everyone has a camera phone. Estimates I’ve heard put the rate at about 2/3 of Americans, and in most of the rest of the world it’s probably lower. Not everyone can pay $200 for a fragile, easily lost or stolen portable computer, and $50 a month to maintain a WiFi internet connection with infinite mobile data, so that they can upload every picture they take to social media and hope it goes viral. Sometimes you can’t get a signal, or your battery dies, or you’re shaking so much in anxiety that the camera image is just a constant blur. There’s absolutely no guarantee that a person who sees a ghost, owns a smartphone, and has their fully charged smartphone on them is actually going to be able to take a video that will “settle the question” of ghosts once and for all.
Second, let’s not forget that a hugely lucrative industry in the modern world is devoted to creating illusions good enough to fool the onlooker into accepting them as real. I still remember back in 2010 or thereabouts, seeing a YouTube video entitled “UFO over Glasgow Airport”; I think it’s still up if you want to go look at it. It’s pretty dang realistic, but right in the video description, the uploader admits it’s just him practicing his CGI skills. If someone took crystal-clear smartphone footage of an actual alien spacecraft, would anyone believe it was real? Could it possibly be so good that even the skeptics would accept it as genuine? Or are we as a culture so jadedly certain that we’ve seen it all, so confident in the authorities who tell us that modern science has basically all the answers, that literally no proof of the unusual would ever be accepted by the general public?
And finally, not to get too paranoid, but if there were an SCP Foundation-esque agency out there, trying to control what the public believes is true or possible about the world we live in, I don’t think they’d have to try very hard. Remember, unless you take some pretty unusual steps to protect your data, pretty much all of it is an open book to Google and/or Apple. If you had absolute, unarguable video proof that Bigfoot is real, how many digital chokepoints does that video file have to pass through on its way to the public? How many gatekeepers at these various corporations and governments worldwide have the ability to kill your story before it spreads too far? Even if a few thousand people see your video before Facebook or YouTube takes it down for “spreading misinformation” or some similar excuse, would anyone listen to one more group claiming to believe something the majority does not? What are the odds that you could actually get a message out to enough people that mattered, fast enough to outfox anyone with a vested interest in shutting you up wouldn’t have the chance to do so, and actually have anyone who does hear your tale believe you, instead of believing a few dozen media talking heads who all dismiss you as a conspiracy looney?
TLDR, I don’t think it’s time to stop believing in the unusual just yet. Our methods of understanding the world are better now than in the Dark Ages, but they are by no means perfect.