Back in the day of only a handful of newspapers and of 1 camera per 1 million people (at least on the average day, the average person wouldn't lug their camera around with them), we had sightings of Yeti, Bigfoot, Nessie, El Chupacabra, etc.
Now we have the internet, an unstoppable torrent of crappy news and the mother of all tabloids, everyone has a high resolution camera in their pockets at all times, and cryptoids are all but gone.
I would have expected 16k HDR resolution photos of Yeti by now.
I feel betrayed! :-p
To be fair, a warship at sea probably doesn't allow their sailors to carry their phone around for opsec reasons.
Thus why it's the only remaining gap in the "ufo of the gaps" theory!
I recall reading a few weeks ago that not only the sailors have consumer grade equipment but that there are procedures in cases like this for sailors to use that equipment so there is more footage to analyze later
We are asked to believe the military is intelligent, but if that's the case then I have my doubts.
So I guess the correlation is: cryptids can't coexist with smartphones. Makes sense. I get a feeling that cryptids aren't the social media type.
If you've ever tried taking a photo of a particularly pretty moon with your phone, you'll know what I'm talking about. The striking orange harvest moon that seems to dominate the night sky suddenly becomes a little smear of light when you look at the photo on your phone.
Most phones or other cameras that people casually carry around have a relatively wide angle lens and accompanying FOV. That means anything at a distance will end up looking even further in the distance (ie, smaller) once you take the shot.
So to get a nice, clear picture of a distant object in the sky you're going to need a telephoto lens. That's fine, and there are plenty of people out there casually carrying around a telephoto. Except now you have a new problem: you need to track the moving object through your telephoto. Not impossible, of course, but not easy for typical person who happens to see a strange object in the sky while they have their camera with them.
Also, if the object is moving, you'll need a fast shutter speed. And if you increase your shutter speed you're going to have to increase your ISO as well. If you're seeing this strange object at night, that means you're likely pushing your ISO into a range where your photo starts to get pretty grainy.
All of these aren't insurmountable problems, people that shoot flying birds and planes do it all the time. But it takes a combination of equipment and photography skills that aren't exactly common. So now we're looking at a venn diagram of "people who see something strange in the sky" and "people who have the equipment and skills to get a good photo" to calculate our odds of having a really great photo of a UFO by now.
All that said, the point is still valid ("why don't we have more photos now?"). But at the same time, it's not as easy of a problem as many seem to think.
So, my comment here is about 2014 and the tic tac incident, not the swarm-of-drones incident from last year.
If they really did have reports for the two days leading up to the tic tac incident I have to think they would have tasked an aircraft with top notch (beyond any handheld camera) photographic capabilities to investigating such an alarming intrusion.
Or, they are really stupid.
Or, the radar hits in the preceding two days were just phantom hits and possibly assessed as such at the time, with jets sent up to look just as a "why not" kind of thing since they were already in the area for training.
My bet is with the last possibility, because I find it hard to think so badly of the Navy people. And the hits were just phantom / ghost hits in a new system. Which means: not alien / Russian / etc. craft.
And the actual object actually seen by the pilots was some chunks of ice falling from outer space, some of which made whitecaps and another of which was seen flitting erratically and thus moving in ways that no known aircraft is capable of. It "came up to meet" Dave Fraver AS HE WAS GOING DOWN yeah no surprise there, and, as the sonic boom from his jet slammed into the snowy ice, it, again no surprise, disintegrated and disappeared, because sonic boom, which disintegration he interpreted as out-of-this-world acceleration. OK, maybe the other Navy people are with it, but Dave may have been experiencing some effects of the G forces or something. He seems like a nice guy.
The other pilot who spoke about this described the movement of the object in a way that exactly matches what I said, a falling slab of snowy ice. Her words: "Like when you drop your cell phone in the kitchen and it bounces around."
Again this entire comment is talking about the tic tac incident, from 2014, not the summer of 2020 incident.
https://www.gsmarena.com/myth_debunked_samsungs_100x_zoom_do...
It’s unclear how you’ve reached the conclusion that #2 is unlikely without knowing how widespread the use of this technology is, and in what circumstances/locations it’s being used.
Classified military technology exists and is being tested all the time, without any high-res pictures leaking.
I guess another theory is that aliens are pranking these people. "Hey Blart, lets go to Earth and let one guy without a camera see part of our spaceship from a distance. Everyone will think he is crazy. HAHAHA"
Photographing something like this would probably require a DSLR type camera with a great zoom/telephoto lens. I would expect they have that equipment on military ships, but I don’t think the ubiquity of cell phone cameras has significantly changed the ability to photograph this kind of phenomenon.
Now I figure it was just a rogue cloud, weather balloon or weird atmospheric effect, but there are still phenomena that are hard to capture on camera.
So far, all we got is grainy video and verbal accounts from military pilots using jargon-laden language that sounds authoritative released to the general public.
The thing is, these pilots have instruments, jobs, and mindsets that are intended to handle known things. They are neither impartial nor critical observers. The key thing is we don't know yet what they saw, nor do they. We don't even know if these are "objects" or sensor/sensory "artifacts".
Occam's Razor is intended to apply in EXACTLY situations like this.
The good news is that if these phenomena are as common as people say, it should be possible to devise procedures, measurements, and analysis to start to rule out what these are not.
Bear in mind, every new story doesn't indicate a new sighting - these stories are mostly retreads of the same few incidents and a vague pins-and-twine narrative connecting other stories like the Pais patents to get some extra mileage out of it.
In particular, the Alizondo character keeps popping up as some kind of head of a government research project. He's been trotting this stuff around for years, but according to a 2019 story in The Intercept, the dude's employment story doesn't check out: https://theintercept.com/2019/06/01/ufo-unidentified-history...
I suppose the news outlets are hungry for clicks now that Stable Genius isn't around to send them a zinger everyday.
> The thing is, these pilots have instruments, jobs, and mindsets that are intended to handle known things. They are neither impartial nor critical observers. The key thing is we don't know yet what they saw, nor do they. We don't even know if these are "objects" or sensor/sensory "artifacts".
There's a lot to unpack here.
Yes, they are intended to handle known things. Drones, weather balloons, cloud formations, jet plumes. These are all known, and our observations do not match them.
Impartial nor critical? I would suggest you watch the interviews with the pilots from the USS Nimitz incident. It's mentioned a major reason we don't hear a lot of these accounts is because of the stigma of reporting UFOs, which is why his copilots have been silent on the matter until now.
Lastly they are real objects. Multiple eye witness accounts with multiple radar signatures, from carriers and jets.
I did and I am not convinced their observations reveal much about these phenomena. Military pilots are very capable people with good eyes, but they're trained and focused strictly on their very demanding job. They are not in the air to conduct general-purpose scientific observations, nor do they necessarily have the tools at their disposal to truly evaluate what they're seeing.
> Drones, weather balloons, cloud formations, jet plumes. These are all known, and our observations do not match them.
Do not match any? Or some? or one? There's multiple videos out there, very different from each other and each could have a different explanation.
It really does come down to Occam's Razor.
The person who commented on your comment clearly provided information about what you said, but you're just disagreeing with him.
In isolation yes, the videos are not remarkable. But it's not in isolation, as you seem to be discounting the context they're taken and ignoring the relevance of the eye witness accounts and their flight behaviour on radar (descending from space, disappearing and reappearing a hundred miles away, etc).
Unless you think they're all in on something or lying, which is fair enough, but from how the situation is unfolding with demands from congress, experiences of all the service members, and civilian pilots, I'm partial there is something of a phenomena here.
> It really does come down to Occam's Razor
Heuristics apply in the general case but definitionally may not when there is enough evidence the event is an outlier.
Obviously such a claim would need evidence and a plausible motive and shouldn't be suspected without evidence; but, also obviously, it's one of many hypotheses that would have a much higher probability of being true than extraterrestrially-originated visitation.
On the flip side, the public that has both a less formal and generally lower understanding of this and other things, also led on by various forms of popular culture, have a wholly fantastical minds image when they hear "UFO".
One thing that will be interesting is to see if any other nations have had encounters like this and can supply video and sensor data evidence.
There is no major military that hasn't participated in large scale fabrications as a concealment technique for their own operations or technological developments. The US military certainly has on multiple occasions.
Obviously the aliens have some anti surveillance tech that renders our cameras less useful!
Also if there are aliens monitoring humans, obviously they'll adjust their operations as our devices change.
I doubt highly intelligent beings from another world would give a damn what our devices were capable of.