In this era, this kind of project is just the bucket of ice water we need to shake off some silly beliefs and get back to reality.
Or discover that the CCP has secretly developed fully functional hypersonic planes...
Instead we only see blurry UFO images, because all images that aren't blurry turn out to show mundane things.
These are used for both SAR and for target identification purposes you don’t want to blow up another civilian aircraft or a fishing vessel by mistaking it for with a military target.
I don’t know exactly what the US is running but sensors from other countries I’ve seen are capable of reading the tail number of a passenger jet from a substantial distance.
These sensors are also thermally stabilized and corrected for atmospheric disturbances as much as possible, and usually capable of visual spectrum + NIR and NUV to provide even higher fidelity.
If these sightings around carrier battle groups and fleets are indeed so common we should have pretty decent evidence of what these things are.
These systems are powerful and precise enough to be used for fine grained targeting, in fact in many cases the guns of the ship and the CIWS systems will be guided with electro optical sensors rather than radar.
Radar picks things up, the ElOp system then interrogates the target, ranges it with with a laser which provides much higher precision than radar range finding and if need be guns go brrrttt…
Why is it that nobody has ever obtained an in-focus picture of a mysterious flying craft?
I mean, I would understand if a significant proportion were out-of-focus, or a tiny dot due to distance. But... never? Ever ever? Not one? Not in the history of the human race? With billions of phone cameras in pockets? Hundreds of millions of "proper" cameras out there, and at least a few million high-end DSLRs with decent glass attached?
Makes it seem like UFOs are the invisible dragon in my garage, if you know what I mean...
So I would be extremely suspicious of sharp clear properly exposed pictures of UFOs.
I can take clear pictures of airplanes flying ~400m above me without any issues.
(I don't think you are lying, but it's nice to see an example. Also I strongly like "pics or it didn't happen".)
All shot on a Canon 1100D with a 75-300mm zoom lens, using manual focus with the "full auto" mode for controlling aperture, shutter time etc. Usually I am leaning out of a window or standing in my garden to capture these shots.
As you can see, none of these images are particularly "good": the subjects in the first three images are underexposed due to their dark colouring against a light background, some are slightly out of focus, some show evidence of dirt or other marks on the camera sensor, yet you can still make out various details on all of them. One would imagine that if there were an equivalent photo of an actual "alien" UFO, it would be on the front page of newspapers across the world.
(One trick that I use for family photos is to use a delay of 1 second, to avoid the movement when I press the shutter. (It's not useful when there are kids. One second later they are in another room.))
But I do agree with your sentiment.
Maybe they have some sort of skin on the craft that scatters light in a way where it appears not to be in focus.
If the craft is, in effect, bending gravity to fly, maybe it also bends the light around it causing it to look blurry.
I took several photos of it, but after I come home I realized they were all unsharp - unlike the rest of my photos, which were fine, including those taken during the night cycle. I wrote that down to 'excessive realism' on the part of the builders...
Anyway, apparently the device that causes photos to blur can easily be miniaturized and installed on a 5cm large UFO.
however, don't let these simple facts ruin the magic. ;)
Sometimes the real world is more fun: China has hypersonic FO operational since 2019 per https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DF-ZF
Independently of how good our technology is, there'll always be pictures of low quality that leave room for speculation.
For instance, if we see something like these, the explanation is going to be drones:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVTlN41Mr9w
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5CSReaPNcg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1a95YERVRBM
If we see something like these, CGI, I suppose:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wskl8NJ2wU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cE-Yrv1-chI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JRi7VUZTcA
This one is taken by a military grade camera at night, I suppose it could be a drone or a bird:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1qiZ_L8wX4
Because it's not reproducible it's always possible to explain away everything. It's an epistemology nightmare but I find it very interesting, specially when you have testimonies from people that you don't have a reason to doubt. I have to think if, maybe, our priors are too strong in one direction.
So in all of their technological might they track in real time the location of all photo sensors in the world, and only reveal themselves in locations where only potato cameras are present.