[dilippkumar]

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.

[llamaLord]

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...

[suddenclarity]

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.

[cameronh90]

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.

[marginalia_nu]

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

[twic]

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

[dilippkumar]

> 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.

[nradov]

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.

[NoZebra120vClip]

https://xkcd.com/1235/

[stevenhuang]

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.