[sammalloy]

> Except that even as young child I started noticing that all of the photos were blurry. All of them. Focus dispels UFOs just like turning on the light dispels the monster in the bedroom.

Not exactly. Jacques Vallée and others have spent a lot of time addressing the question of why UFO photos are always blurry and out of focus. His ideas about it are fascinating. There’s also a lot of photos that aren’t blurry, such as the 1971 Cote UFO. It doesn’t mean they are alien, but there’s definitely something real getting photographed that’s still unidentified. I’ve also been interested in how writers like Arthur C. Clarke and Liu Cixin address the topic of how an advanced alien species could control physics, the noosphere, and the human mind itself.

[jiggawatts]

> 1971 Cote UFO

That could be anything. Damage to the film negative is a simple explanation!

Any single picture is basically just fan-art. I and many others with a reasonable level of scepticism wouldn't accept anything other than the same UFO or "design" of UFO turning up in many photos, ideally from some sort of scientific sky survey array run by non-UFO-fanatic astronomer types.

In fact, several such survey systems are being built right now, and a few are already operational.

The operational ones have not found anything.

Strange, isn't it that the better the quality of the survey, the less likely UFOs are to turn up in the data?

[sammalloy]

You’re preaching to the choir. I am very much a skeptical materialist. The problem is that there are a significant number of unknowns and unidentified reports that have never been explained. And those are the ones we are talking about.