Hacker News Reader

Comment by oblio | Hacker News Reader

That's the main thing I found funny.

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

View on HN

Hey it did turn out the giant squids were totally real though! So that’s pretty neat. When I was born less than 40 years ago it wasn’t known if they were an actual species.

> Hey it did turn out the giant squids were totally real though!

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.

I think you might be confused; giant squid were known to be a real species as far back as the 1800s based on specimens that washed ashore. But it was only within the last couple decades that they were imaged alive in their natural environment.

my kids ask me if I believe and I tell them I used to. However, given the HDR phone in everyones pocket for a decade+ and no photos of a ghost, alien, saucer, cryptid ????? I am now a non believer.

Cryptoids down, police violence up!

Like they explain in "close encounters of the third kind", no one has a high definition photograph of a car accident as it happens either (of course, now that we have dash cams..)

That might have been true when "Close Encounters" was made, but there are 100s of videos of car accidents on Youtube.

https://xkcd.com/1235/

To be fair, a warship at sea probably doesn't allow their sailors to carry their phone around for opsec reasons.

> 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!

Pilots and crew on aircraft certainly carry cameras - part of standard procedure on intercepting an aircraft includes photography for intelligence collection purposes.

> To be fair, a warship at sea probably doesn't allow their sailors to carry their phone around for opsec reasons.

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

And the warship itself in 2020 doesn't have any onboard cameras… ?

We are asked to believe the military is intelligent, but if that's the case then I have my doubts.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com