[JulianMorrison]

1) Stuff recorded on people's phones is going to have poor resolution, particularly at night when anything but the most cutting edge phone cameras produce a grainy mess.

2) The military is not going to give you full-resolution video, they keep secrets like that reflexively.

[sgt101]

If UFO's were "real" (as in actual aliens or other amazing things) then I would have expected a vast increase in footage and photos over the last five years as cameraphones and dash cams became pervasive. This has happened for "fireballs" and meteors - lots of amazing dashcam footage from Siberia and Canada and so on.

Why not alien spaceships?

Because alien spaceships are not here.

[JulianMorrison]

There are an absolute heap of videos. Mostly of lights at night when phone cameras are weak, or dots high in the sky, but still. Go look on the MUFON site.

Meteors have the showmanship advantage of being big, bright, high, and visible from a very large area.

Both meteors and UFOs have the problem of "whoa what was that, didn't have time to get my camera out". UFOs additionally have the problem of "too amazed to act".

[majkinetor]

UFOs must be real because there are no single incidents so far in the universe as we know it.

Intelligent life happened here, it must happen again somewhere else. This should be made axiom really. You/we/whatever is not unique in the universe.

So, "If UFO's were real" is not really a question. Whether this was an UFO or something else is a question.

Your other questions "why not spaceships etc" are antrophorphic in nature and not relevant at all.

[JulianMorrison]

Expecting life on other planets can be justified that way. Expecting intelligent life can be weakly justified, it only happened once here and seems to involve a lot of fluke. Expecting UFOs can't rest on that argument alone - you'd need new physics to get from any A to any B at an interstellar level and even more new physics to pull right-angle turns at high mach numbers in an atmosphere.

[majkinetor]

> it only happened once here

You don't know that. Maybe there were super intelligent lizards before us. Lets not be ridiculous. We can't even know if it is a current situation because anthropomorphic ideas and agendas (or even timeframe) do not necessarily reflect other life forms - maybe fungi is already connected to other dimensions like in recent star track episodes ?

There is also thinking that merging pre-mitochondria with bacteria into more complex cell giving birth to complex multicelular life was singular event on this planet and so must be very rare, but its unpprovable really and even if true just lowers the odds.

> you'd need new physics to get from any A to any B at an interstellar level and even more new physics to pull right-angle turns at high mach numbers in an atmosphere.

Really ? Aliens having totally different understanding on universe and tech then us sounds amazing ? Just if you had a time machine and get back lousy couple centuries would make us look like aliens.

[maze-le]

>> Intelligent life happened here, it must happen again somewhere else. This should be made axiom really. You/we/whatever is not unique in the universe.

We don't really know the probability of abiogenesis (let alone artifacts from that process leading to intelligent life). If it is sufficiently improbable -- 1 / 10^22 per star[0] -- it may very well be that we are the only ones in the observable universe.

The universe is pretty darn big, but life is also pretty darn complex, and its emergence from amino acids and "simple" organic chemistry is not very well understood. Unless the factors of abiogenesis are sufficiently well known, we shouldn't make such predictions either...

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[0]: once per (100 * 10^9 stars in the galaxy times 100 * 10^9 galaxies per hubble volume).

[majkinetor]

Yah, cell machinery is also complex yet it emerged number of times independently on this planet alone (convergent evolution).

> We don't really know the probability of abiogenesis

Abiogenesis is only one way to look at it. What about intelligent design ? Probability it is relevant is 100%, given that humans are one of those IDs already (created polio virus).

So again, most are having tunnel vision about this topic given our constraints and limitations on this planet.

[maze-le]

Ah, I see, abiogenesis is "tunnel vision", but unjustified belief in a deus ex machina which designed life is somehow enlightened...? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. There is no evidence of god, therefore I don't have any confidence in the flying spaghetti monster.

>> Yah, cell machinery is also complex yet it emerged number of times independently on this planet alone

That's not even wrong. I don't even know where to begin refuting this claim -- so I just leave it there.

Sometimes it would do us some good to accept the fact that we just don't know it (yet). Yet alone considering the philosophical consequences of ID: who designed the designers? How did the first designers emerge? What were they made of (considering that the chemical abundance of the galactical environment was heavily skewerd towards lighter elements 4.5 Gy ago)?

In the meantime, I stick to the models that don't rely on an allmighty entity to bootstrap biological evolution.

[majkinetor]

> but unjustified belief in a deus ex machina which designed life is somehow enlightened...?

Humans are designers already, what more proof do you need: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/2122619.stm

You are confusing ID with creationism. The later is one foolish and easily refutable variant of ID akin to Santa and other fairy tails.

> There is no evidence of god, therefore I don't have any confidence in the flying spaghetti monster.

Comparing life to another life is not the same as comparing life to superbeings.

> who designed the designers?

That is irrelevant for this topic. It didn't stop people researching big bang, did it ?

> In the meantime, I stick to the models that don't rely on an allmighty entity to bootstrap biological evolution

In the meantime, understand it doesn't have to be allmighty :) It can simply be another advanced enough life (remember that one about advanced tech compared to magic?). The topic is about UFOs, not about origin of life or origin of origin of origin ... of life.