it would seem that the dubbish tendency to scoff at things and not even entertain their possible validity is deeply entrenched.
I don't disagree with this, but I think there's more to it than that. Many people have developed "bullsh*t filters" that help them determine what's worth spending any time on and what isn't. For instance, if I said, "There was a guy in Detroit last week that held 500 people hostage at a GM plant and threatened to blow the place up if he didn't get to talk to a member of the Governing Body," you could probably assume I was wrong. Why? You follow the news, and you didn't hear anything about it. 500 hostages, bomb, Detroit, you would have heard something about it by now. Maybe you'll search google news on it, but probably not. Surely though, if you didn't get some hits on your search you'd dismiss me.
That's not scoff'ing, it's just filtering out the noise. You can't spend your life investigating everything that comes along, so you immediately label some things as "99% certainly false" and move on.
And then there are things that aren't at all new, have been researched and disproven, but have been rediscovered by someone. To them, it's groundbreaking news. To you, it's an old legend.
True, most fantastic but true stories start off with people not believing them. But so do most fantastic but false ones.
Dave