I see UFOs all the time. I'm just don't know that much about aircraft and am not good at identifying them. Doesn't mean we've made contact with extraterrestrial life or that it would be worth my time to videorecord anything.
At least half the time, its when I'm most of my attention is directed to observing the paths of moving vehicles in my surroundings. I fear it wouldn't be safe to pull out my phone then.
Try taking a photo of a plane in the sky with your phone sometime. You'll find that the angle of the lens is too wide to capture things far away.
Now, I agree with your basic premise that UFO sightings are probably mostly BS since the number of sightings has plummeted since people started carrying cellphones, but notice how people aren't reporting that they took a picture and now it too small for them to see. They just stopped altogether.
My pet theory is that UFOs are an intrinsically 20th century phenomenon. TV no longer has that iconography on all the time, so we're not getting poked and prodded with the images anymore, and for anyone paying attention to our ever-improving 21st century understandings of the limits of technology, the idea that advanced races would be visiting us in huge spacecraft that sometimes get accidentally seen is absurd. If they wish to observe us without being seen, then it is very easy to imagine that they have long since modified our brains in such a way that they can simply edit themselves out, and also ensured that nobody is capable of witnessing the modifications, either. The idea of a War of the Worlds scenario where perhaps we could fight off an invasion is a very 20th century idea... in the 21st century it's pretty clear that if a starfaring culture wanted us out of the way, we'd be dead before we even realized a conflict had started. And I mean that literally; if they so chose, every human on the planet simultaneously dropping dead with no human-detectable advance warning wouldn't be all that challenging. Alternatively, at an unknown time in our past our entire planet's information content was hoovered up, we're running in a simulation, and the real solar system has long since been converted to computronium in the real world.
Personally I still favor life being more rare than we credit it with, and that we are fundamentally alone. But regardless, the idea that we're being visited in sometimes-observed spacecraft by apparently only quasi-competent aliens is absurd in light of what we know now. If "they" are among us, they are not quasi-competent, they are competent to a level that we can barely imagine.
I think you may be on to something about it being an intrinsically 20th century phenomenon. It may work out like Spritualism, where the movement ran strong for a relatively brief period and then petered out under the withering light of popular scrutiny. Its effects on our culture are still omnipresent, but very few people subscribe to it nowadays because the idea that the dead are with us and want to communicate to us - but only for the sake of performing party tricks and sharing the most tedious of banalities - is hard to really take seriously.
The UFO meme's not so different. Super-advanced races using their incomprehensibly superior technology to fling themselves across the near-infinite vastness of space are visiting us in order to. . . prank aircraft pilots, share tedious banalities and diddle butts. The word 'risible' again comes to mind.
I've long suspected the reason that all videos of UFOs are smeary/unclear is because if they were clear, we would be able to see which kind of aircraft it is in the footage, and it wouldn't be a UFO (but an air balloon, commercial aircraft, glider, etc.).
One thing that is certain is that if no alien air crafts have ever visited earth, then all UFO videos/pictures must necessarily be unclear, because otherwise we'd see that it's not a flying saucer.
I tried to take a picture of a deer once in a park with my phone. I knew where the deer had run to, so I had everything on my side. Alas, the deer run when it saw me, and given how slow the auto-focus of my phone was, all I got was a small blur. Not even I would believe me.
I gained some respect that day for anyone who claims to have seen something, and yet has no decent evidence.
Maybe the slow, error-prone autofocus and ridiculous number of UI steps required to launch many phone cameras were part of the coverup conspiracy ;-). Seriously though, I've had the same problem. Why can't my phone just give me manual focus?
One problem with the conclusion: Type UFO video 2014 and you'll see that there are still hundreds of hours of video taken about this every single year... So, I'd say the evidence keeps mounting for something its just more convenient (then ever) to ignore it.
> its just more convenient (then ever) to ignore it
Why would it be convenient to ignore it if it was real? Legitimate evidence of extraterrestrial life would be, by and large, the most significant event in human history, and incredibly inconvenient to ignore for a virtually unlimited number of reasons.
Information overflow causes people to ignore even the most dire and well recorded parts of science (see climate change). Why would this be any different? Its socially taboo. Its also scientifically taboo. There are lots of ways to fake imagery these days. People prefer to believe what they already believe even in the face of massive amounts of evidence to the contrary. Thats well proven.
A video of something you can't readily identify is not an evidence of space aliens. It's not even an evidence of it being extra-terrestrial. It could very well be a normal aeroplane or an optical illusion. Given that one is far more likely than the other, it's hard to assume that it's from the outer space. There is no actual evidence of aliens, I'm afraid.
Actually the few cases that remain unexplained are exactly that sort of evidence (or some other intelligent control). Sorry to say but you obviously havent looked at the actual evidence from military personal and equipment that show high speed right angle turns of devices that defy the laws of physics as we understand them. There are literally 1000s of cases on record about this that have been left in the unexplainable category.
Try filming a distant moving object with a commodity phone camera, especially in lower light. Everyone has a camera, yes, but it's the wrong kind of camera for capturing anything useful in this area.
If you wanted to get a good UFO photo or video what you'd really want is a high-resolution infrared camera. Unless our UFOnauts (whatever/whoever they are) are exempt from physics, anything using energy for any kind of powered flight must emit infrared whether it wants to or not.
Search youtube for UFO and you'll find thousands of videos with sightings.
I personally think that they are all fakes or explainable objects, but who knows, maybe there are real UFOs in those videos ?
What kind of video would it take for us to believe ?
