SPOILER ALERT: How Every TV Show About Bigfoot Ends

Turn on the Travel Channel any day, and if there isn’t a show about BBQ on, there’s a good chance that it’s a show about hunting Bigfoot or some other unknown animals, also known as cryptids. (Side note: it's time to combine the two shows into one. People look for Bigfoot, but at the same time smoke a world class brisket. I’d call it something simple like “Bigfoot BBQ,” then just wait for the Emmys to start rolling in.)  

When I was a kid, I watched hours upon hours of these shows and to this day I have been known to kick back and watch a show where a bunch of guys sit on a boat and stare at a lochin hopes that they’ll see Nessie pop her head out of the water ("loch" Scottish speak for lake for those of you not in the know. *Sniff).

I’m not sure what it is I love about these shows because the second I turn one on I know that they aren’t going to find anything. How do I know that? Because if they did actually find evidence proving the existence of Bigfoot, Nessie, the Chupacabra, or whatever the cryptid dú jour is, there’s not a chance in hell they’d be able to keep that secret through a few months of post-production so that the news could be unveiled on a Thursday night at ten somewhere in 200s between Tru TV and WGN America on your cable package.

If they actually found something can you imagine how monumentally huge that would be? If there were an ape in the mountains of Oregon or some little alien-dog thing cruising around the southwest sucking the blood out of livestock, it would be front page news! They’d break into the middle of Monday Night Football to announce it, or at the very least it’d earn itself a Google Doodle for a day.

I’ll admit as I’ve gotten older I’ve seen my belief that one day we’ll discover most cryptids diminish. Do I hope it still happens? You’re goddamn right I do! But, unfortunately, if it hasn’t happened by now, it probably won’t ever.

I mean, we have robots that can think for themselves and we've been to the moon. There have been countless scientific discoveries and innovations over the years.

With that in mind, I hate to be a buzzkill, but I kind of find it hard to believe that in the long history of mankind, no one spent enough time wandering through the woods to bump into a 7½ foot tall ape and be able to prove it with anything better than a blurry, out of focus Polaroid.