Dinosaurs Today?

I have a roommate who loves to read about conspiracy theories (and also believes in a lot of them, to my own concern). She had explained to me quite a few: the Denver airport, The New World Order, and how Taylor Swift came to fame. But the one that I found the most ridiculous is about dinosaurs. I bet you remember in school learning about how dinosaurs roamed the earth thousand if not millions of years ago. And then a meteoroid or some large flaming ball of death hit killing them all. Well, some people believe it is wrong.

There's a field of science called cryptozoology that dedicate their lives to researching and proving the existence of some species such as Bigfoot. In addition, they also are trying to find real life dinosaurs. So what do they believe? Dinosaurs are all still alive and all live in various parts of unpopulated Africa. Some believe that the government collected all the dinosaurs and placed them in Africa and teaching children that they died a very long time ago. Their believes are fueled by sightings reported by others in Africa. Others believe that the dinosaurs fled underground before the comet hit and have now made vast and intricate underground cities. Earthquake problems? Blame it on the dinosaurs.

I've been sitting here for several minutes now internally debating to myself and also talking with a friend about why people believe in such a crazy thing as this. We both came up with several ideas.

1. People don't trust the government and believe they're always trying to control us or kill us. I mean part of this conspiracy is the government is hiding away all the dinosaurs and lying to us about their extinction. But why would they do this? They have something to hide from us and using this as a way to control us. Why would they hide the existence of dinosaurs? It doesn't matter because who can trust them anyways?

2. People like to have something to hope in. I think there's something exciting about the possibility of dinosaurs existing. The thought of something that shouldn't be out there that actually is. This excitement can give a sense of hope to people. Hope of finding and proving that something actually exists. Hope from looking at fossils as a child and knowing they exist out there. Hope like from Santa bringing you presents as a kid.

3. People are assholes and like causing chaos. (Sorry, that's not the empathetic response you're looking for).