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If only there was a network of automatic telescopes watching the sky 24/7.

Oh, there is.[1] GEODSS, with pairs of automated telescopes, picks up satellites, larger space junk, and incoming missiles and asteroids. It has a star catalog and a satellite orbital catalog, and reports anything it doesn't already have on file.

One of the GEODSS sites is no longer used by the USAF, and it's now run by MIT to detect near earth orbit asteroids.[2] The University of Arizona also has Spacewatch, with two automated telescopes.[3] Those two between them have discovered several hundred thousand minor asteroids.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Space_Surveillan...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln_Near-Earth_Asteroid_Re...

[3] https://spacewatch.lpl.arizona.edu/

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With a billion cellphone cameras out there there are both things that have become more believable because there is video now. And things less believable Because no one has really captured them. An example of the former is tornadoes which footage was rather rare until cameras become commonplace. An example of the latter is Bigfoot with not much new imagery.

Now what category would you assign UFOs?

> Now what category would you assign UFOs?

"Poorly-defined term, verging on motte-and-bailey."

Anything in the sky someone can't identify is a UFO. Someone sees Venus, doesn't know what it is, Venus is now a UFO. But because "UFO" is associated with "extraterrestrial aliens visiting Earth" saying that people see UFOs is taken for being equivalent to saying that people see extraterrestrial aliens.

Was the existence of tornadoes really ever in doubt? I mean the connection between tornadoes and hook echos on weather radar has been know since at least the 50s and Ted Fujita is well known for his work on tornadoes during the 70s. I was really into meteorology as a kid during the late 90s and early 2000s and I don't remember ever reading anything that implied that there was doubt that tornadoes existed.

Tornados are supposed to be pretty common in LA, where they are called, instead, "weather events".

There are lots of places that have more or less frequent tornadoes where real estate people and homeowners would rather they not be mentioned.

“Although Los Angeles County has never experienced the monsters that terrorize the midwest, tornadoes, albeit smaller ones, are not unknown here. Since 1950, at least 42 tornadoes were reported to have occurred in Los Angeles County. Most were quite small, covering short distances and doing little or no damage.”

— http://www.laalmanac.com/weather/we701.php

Doppler weather radar didn't exist in the 50's.

> The first known radar observations of a confirmed tornado were made at the Illinois State Water Survey on the 9th of April 1953.

http://www.chill.colostate.edu/w/CHILL_history#The_First_Tor...

The receptive field on a cell phone camera is absolutely miniscule, and lenses are designed to widen the camera's field of view such that they can effectively capture nearby objects.

Combine that with camera software being designed to enhance conventional images, and low-light performance on CMOS sensors being abysmal, and photos of anything at any reasonable distance are necessarily degraded to such a point that you may well have been better off not taking the photograph in the first place.

Trying to decent take photo of a low-flying aircraft is tricky enough for your average user, who has to hold their camera steady while tracking a moving object and wrestling with autofocus looking for anything that might be a face. I don't think the camera ubiquity argument holds much water with respect to the UFO phenomena, outside of the most preposterous annecdotes.

Phone cameras are great at capturing tornadoes and terrible at capturing tiny objects in the sky. Even worse at night.

Given the number of photos I have taken with my phone that appeared to just be empty sky, but if I zoomed way in and scrolled around I would eventually stumble onto a blurry blob that was probably the plane I had been trying to photograph, I'm not so sure that the XKCD you cited is right when it comes to things in the sky.

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