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I dislike this XKCD. Where is the line for the total number of photos and videos take of unidentified phenomenon? Has it gone down? Or has it actually gone up,

by goda90 6y ago

I dislike this XKCD. Where is the line for the total number of photos and videos take of unidentified phenomenon? Has it gone down? Or has it actually gone up, but because of the exponentially growing amount of media being produced in the world, the people who are exposed to these photos and videos are proportionally tiny. Add on to that, the fact that phone cameras are terrible at distance. Ever try taking a picture of the moon with it? Your eyes can see much better than the photo taken by the average smartphone. And if the object is moving around quickly, do you have time to take your phone from your pocket, open the camera, focus on the object, and get a good picture before it is out of sight?

sandworm101 6y ago
There is a line in the movie "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" about traffic accidents. One character says "we don't have any footage of real car crashes, but we know they happen." At the time of the story, no serious car crash had been captured on film. Now, because there are so many more cameras, we have plenty of such footage. A real phenomena should scale with the availability of potential witnesses, not shrink and disappear as more and better cameras come online.
- goda90 6y ago
  Popular sentiment is that UFO videos/photos are fake. With a car crash, you have the aftermath, so you accept the video of the crash as being real. With a UFO, people more often dismiss it even if they lack an alternative explanation. This limits the spread of photographic evidence, and stories from witnesses. So witnesses may have increased, but you don't know about it. Dash cams, security cameras, and phone cameras all have targeted uses. They are "better cameras" for those uses. But they aren't better cameras for every use. As I was saying about the moon, some shots require more specialized equipment to get good detail. The number of people out with a DSLR and the right lens who knows how to properly take a shot of a flying object and is intently looking for flying objects has not really increased much.
  - sandworm101 6y ago
    Any iPhone is 100x better at capturing footage of moving objects than any film camera was in decades past. Tech like autofocus, auto-exposure, automatic white balance, and vibration reduction algorithms mean anyone with a smartphone is better suited to capture strange phenomena than even the best photographers from the height of the 90s UFO craze.
    - goda90 6y ago
      And I bet if you went outside right now and tried to take a video of a passenger jet at cruising altitude with an iPhone, it wouldn't look too great. Try it again at night. The increase in camera phones does not mean we should have definitive proof of UFOs if they existed. Every day people are posting things in the sky that they can't identify on social media, and usually the footage taken with their phone is not good.
      - sandworm101 6y ago
        The phone attaches a time/GPS stamp to the image that makes identification of the UFO as an aircraft very easy.

by goda90 6y ago

sandworm101 6y ago

There is a line in the movie "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" about traffic accidents. One character says "we don't have any footage of real car crashes, but we know they happen." At the time of the story, no serious car crash had been captured on film. Now, because there are so many more cameras, we have plenty of such footage. A real phenomena should scale with the availability of potential witnesses, not shrink and disappear as more and better cameras come online.

goda90 6y ago
Popular sentiment is that UFO videos/photos are fake. With a car crash, you have the aftermath, so you accept the video of the crash as being real. With a UFO, people more often dismiss it even if they lack an alternative explanation. This limits the spread of photographic evidence, and stories from witnesses. So witnesses may have increased, but you don't know about it. Dash cams, security cameras, and phone cameras all have targeted uses. They are "better cameras" for those uses. But they aren't better cameras for every use. As I was saying about the moon, some shots require more specialized equipment to get good detail. The number of people out with a DSLR and the right lens who knows how to properly take a shot of a flying object and is intently looking for flying objects has not really increased much.
- sandworm101 6y ago
  Any iPhone is 100x better at capturing footage of moving objects than any film camera was in decades past. Tech like autofocus, auto-exposure, automatic white balance, and vibration reduction algorithms mean anyone with a smartphone is better suited to capture strange phenomena than even the best photographers from the height of the 90s UFO craze.
  - goda90 6y ago
    And I bet if you went outside right now and tried to take a video of a passenger jet at cruising altitude with an iPhone, it wouldn't look too great. Try it again at night. The increase in camera phones does not mean we should have definitive proof of UFOs if they existed. Every day people are posting things in the sky that they can't identify on social media, and usually the footage taken with their phone is not good.
    - sandworm101 6y ago
      The phone attaches a time/GPS stamp to the image that makes identification of the UFO as an aircraft very easy.