I'm the kind that would like it if there were some new frontiers, things we haven't discovered yet. I'm skeptical as to the existence of bigfoot or the Loch Ness monster, but if evidence of either is found, I do think it'd be cool. And I do watch a lot of these investigative shows.
One thing is they say that after stories of flying saucers came out in (I forget) either comics or novels, all of a sudden, people were seeing them all over. There was an explosion in sightings. Likewise, after the infamous bigfoot film, bigfoot sightings exploded.
Many of them have been proved be hoaxes, but many other people seem like credible people. And I would think that not all of these people are making something up. They really do believe they saw something. Not to say they saw what they claim it to be, but their experience is genuine to them.
So, a rational mind would ask. If these things always existed, why is there an explosion in sightings after becoming part of pop culture?
And you could give answers that support these things being real or imagined. ie., in support of them being real, some people could say that people are on the lookout for such things now, whereas before, they may not have noticed or explained it away as something else (a plane instead of a UFO, a bear instead of a bigfoot).
Or, one could say that given the suggestion in their minds from pop culture, people will interpret things through that pre-disposed view.
For example, there were (and probably still are) all of these ghost hunter shows on cable. I'd watch them and they'd record EVP. They'd play it back and I'd hear noises, but couldn't understand it as language. Then somebody will say something like it says "go away" and all of a sudden, wow, holy crap, it said "go away" and now that's all you hear. Which of course, is the power of suggestion. Upon first listening, I couldn't understand a thing, but now all of a sudden, it's entirely understandable? I had the same reactions to backwards masking.