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Comment by 3pac | Hacker News Reader

I saw a UFO maybe 12-13 years ago. It did not look like anything a human would design, even with advanced technology. It looked something like the oblong silver blob in The Flight of the Navigator, just hanging there, "much in the way that a brick doesn't." It must have been 5 km away so it would have been pretty large. It was a breezy overcast day with low clouds, and the moving clouds obscured but never completely revealed it. Its stillness contrasted with the movement of the air, or any aircraft I have ever seen. I stared at it for a few minutes to make sure that my eyes were not deceiving me. I had not been taking drugs. When I came back outside from fetching my camera, it was gone, and I thought, well, this is how it goes, nobody will believe me, so I won't even bother talking about it. I never had more than a passing, pop-culture interest in UFOs.

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Aha! You’re the person I’ve been searching for.

A person who has seen something that is incredible (literally) and has a hard time following up because of a complete absence of data/evidence to back up your claim.

Going back to your experience, what tools do you wish we as a society had that would help us document your experience?

Did you try to document your experience? What were the barriers you encountered? If you were to document it, where would you go to document it?

Ultimately, we need a civilian infrastructure of sensors, cameras etc pointing up at the sky to independently verify UAP. The first step in such an effort is some sort of statistical data that shows how often this occurs.

With such data, we can build a realistic null hypothesis: (x number of cameras looking at y area of the sky for z years should find 0 UFOs if the null hypothesis is true)

It’s impossible for a civilian effort to even begin to accumulate the data to make even vague guesses on what x, y and z should be.

And so, identifying the barriers that you encountered to document your experience is actually kinda important.

Can't tell if being sarcastic or not... But the vast majority of us carry an at least 12 megapixel camera in our pocket literally everywhere we go now...

https://xkcd.com/1235/

The mystery of the lack of good footage in the age of smartphones is less mysterious when one considers that perhaps the phenomenon itself is intelligent.

And in fact if one considers witness testimony, that's what it seems to be.

This is my opinion as well but it should be mentioned that wide angle lenses on phones are quite terrible at picking up small things, especially in low light. I tried once 2-3 years ago when I noticed a bright light late at night from my bedroom window. I'm 100% convinced it had a reasonable explanation but it did bother me that I spent several minutes without getting a decent image/video of something my eyes could see clearly. Since then, I'm a bit more understanding that phones doesn't capture everything but with that said - there are still a ton of DSLRs and telescopes. Unfortunately I didn't have the hindsight of fetching mine.

My current phone (Pixel 7 Pro) has a camera so good that I frequently use it to see things at a distance that I can't make out with my eyes, or to see in the dark when I can't.

However, it does have instances where the images it produces are well below what I can see. I assume there's a large amount of AI clean-up going on that makes it do odd things when presented with odd inputs.

To be fair, you can't even get a decent picture of the moon with a camera phone.

Unless it's a Huawei: https://www.androidauthority.com/huawei-p30-pro-moon-mode-co...

Cell phone cameras generally have terrible dynamic range and have very little optical magnification. Even with a 12 megapixel sensor, when you take a picture of a distant object in the sky you typically end up with just a blurry dot.

> But the vast majority of us carry an at least 12 megapixel camera in our pocket literally everywhere we go now

Here’s an experiment for you to try out. The next time you see a regular airplane up in the sky, pull out your phone and click a picture of it.

You’ll discover a couple of things very quickly. First, most of us do not walk around looking up at the sky. Second, 35k feet up in the air is really really far - at a bit over 6 miles away (in the best case when it is directly overhead and is closest to you), things look tiny on your phone. If you try to magnify even 10x using a phone that’s able to, you’ll discover how impossibly hard it is to track a moving object with 10x magnification.

Once you do this experiment, you can reconsider how likely that a UFO will be photographed by a person with a smartphone.

Same here it’s always always like that as if the ufo has an earth camera detector, I fathom it may still be technically feasible if they are advanced enough. This would explain why nobody has had a clear picture taken of an UFO.

/sarcasm

I've had this experience more times than i can count. Not with flying saucers, but with all manner of terrestrial things - animals, vehicles passing by, people doing things. You see it, you look at it for a bit, you think you should take a photo, and by the time you have your camera in hand and switched on, it's gone.

That’s what I’m talking about

There's a funny concept called the SEP field (Somebody else's problem) from The Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy: https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Somebody_Else%27s_Proble...

We could conceive of a device that would function similarly, like a "Recording device avoidance" or "improbably inconvenient timing" field.

Surely you’re joking, but I had an experience that would line up with that theory. About 6 years ago, well into the iPhone age, I saw a weird looking triangle just kind of floating in the sky. It looked to be the size of an airplane, except it didn’t appear to be using its wings to generate lift. I grabbed my phone to take a photo, but as soon as I had it pointed in the right direction, it shut off! Then it zoomed off.

A bit later I was at lunch, and my phone turned on with 40% of the charge still left.

Realistically, it was some weird drone and a failing battery. But if I allow myself to dream for a moment, that was an alien UFO.

I have wondered if the UFOs specifically exist in a plane that will always be at the edge of our awareness. They aren't so much moving through physical space, but though our collective consciousness. Similar to how a physical person may temporarily exist in your mind, a UFO may temporarily exist in the physical space, and attempting to "capture" them is like trying to control a dream.

Could it have been a large mylar balloon?

Until we have a positive ID that it was not it will be difficult to rule this out.

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