“Why Didn’t You Just Take A Picture?”

Photograph of blobby, indistinct red light in the sky by Morganna. Are you convinced now?

So, there is this sentence that crops up when somebody is talking about seeing something-be it a hairy monster, a UAP, or anything else weird.

It seems to be brought up in a variety of ways-either as an honest question, or as a way to “debunk” what someone says they saw. It is even said by fellow experiencers in a sorrowful cry for lost opportunity. It frustrates me when this comes up as anything other than an honest question-for one thing, random human, you are not the arbiter of truth and for another, it’s just a bad way to “debunk” anything. I feel for the fellow experiencer or investigator when they ask it though-even if I feel like they are chasing a Holy Grail that may never be found. 

“Why didn’t you just take a picture?”

When an experiencer asks this, it feels more like an expression of frustration, of loss, of missed opportunity. We always want some form of proof-to show we aren’t nuts, to have something tangible to study, to gain some legitimacy for the fledgling field of study that is High Strangeness. We like evidence. Evidence is something you can sink your teeth into-something you can show others and say “SEE, I told you there was something odd out there!”. You can break down a photo, enhance it, study it, compare it to other photos. All of that is laudable, valid, and good.

Evidence is good.

But then there are the skeptics.

Which-let me be clear-I think skeptics are perfectly nice individuals and are quite correct to be suspicious and ask for proof. That makes sense to me.

However-there are skeptics, and then there are skeptics.

Some don’t WANT proof-they want to tell you that you’re wrong no matter what.

In the hands of those type of skeptics, the question becomes weaponized. It becomes a smug denouncement of not just what you saw, but of you-for how could you, an otherwise reasonable, rational and intelligent  individual, BELIEVE this sort of nonsense? How could you be so silly as to think you saw anything uncanny? No no, credulous person, you are simply mistaken-and if you can’t prove you saw anything-I mean really, you don’t even have a photo!-why should they believe YOU? 

I think of these folks as “debunkers” more than skeptics.

Skeptics come across as sensible humans who are scientifically minded. They really WOULD believe you with some proof-sometimes they suspect something must be going on, but all the theories surrounding high strangeness are just too out there for them.

And that’s fine. I don’t mind skeptics too much. They are rational beings, and I can’t fault them for not believing things right off the bat. These are the skeptics we try to take photos for, try to gather evidence for.

They may be scientists, family members, or just the world at large. I think they are a needed sounding board for us freaks who delve into this stuff to have-they reign us in when we get all wild eyed and leap ahead of ourselves. I have one in my life who slows my roll when I get too excited and race ahead, with theorizing, heedless of my lack of data. Bless the man. 

So why does this question bug me so much?

Well-weaponized debunker questions aside-it can be a dumb question.

Seriously. How many of y’all reading this have seen something odd, WANTED to take a picture, and found you didn’t have a camera on you? This problem is mitigated now that we all have smartphones, but even then sometimes you don’t have your phone, or it’s out of charge.

The other practical problem with photographing things you see for a short period of time (and why I suspect so many photos are blurry) is: You are taking a photo in a hurry. You may not frame it well, the light may be bad-if you are on a phone and taking a picture of something in the sky it can be a pain to find the damn thing if it’s not huge.  Several encounters with high strangeness are over and done with before you can even get the camera or phone out and pointed in the right direction. 

Not to mention sometimes you simply don’t think of it until it’s too late-I have personally done that. I’ll be staring up at something in the sky, trying to gauge if it’s moving, then WOW it does something astonishing!

And then I just stare at it like a gape-mouthed fool instead of racing for my phone. For which I kick myself, every time, and then it’ll happen again. Sigh. I have bad reflexes on that. 

Then, after all of those perfectly mundane reasons, it’s a bit of a dumb question-we get into the shenanigans surrounding the denizens of the land of strangeness. Cameras, both film and digital, recording equipment, trail cams, phones, car engines, TVs, and even electric lights all go haywire around some of these things. That makes getting a photograph hard. Then, if you have managed to catch SOMETHING on film or in pixels, it doesn’t usually do what you saw with the naked eye justice. Or it’s blurry. 

So, it’s a frustrating question.

It’s also a frustrating quest. Plenty of people have managed to get recordings, audio or video, pictures, you name it, of weird things in action. We all go “YAY! Proof! Now people HAVE to believe us!” And, to their credit-many do. But many don’t. They dig in and start picking apart the evidence, declaring it a fake, declaring you a fake, and you shuffle off, angry and embarrassed.

That’s the other reason it bothers me so much-you cannot get enough evidence to convince the debunkers.

They don’t really WANT it. The mainstream folks doesn’t WANT monsters to be real. They want you to be an easily dismissed fraud and kooky faker. You can never have enough proof for them. (This is why I feel really bad for the Bigfoot researchers who are trying SO HARD to get enough proof-they just keep getting laughed off.) 

So there you have it.

Am I saying give up and don’t try to get evidence?

Hell no. I always have my phone on me now, and I even managed to take a picture of something in the sky a few weeks ago. It looks like crap, (as you can see above) but hey, I guess I get to join the ranks of experiencers with sad, blurry, blobby evidence.

We should keep gathering what we can. I guess I’m saying-accept that some folks will laugh in your face, and throw your evidence right back at you. Which is a pile of bullshit, but there are plenty of people who won’t laugh, who will believe you, and who might even have some ideas about what the hell is going on. So take a picture if you can, for you, and for those who will listen, and not for the ones who you can’t ever convince.

And the next time someone asks you that question as a “gotcha”? Blow ‘em a big ole raspberry and say fuck ‘em, from me.