You (kempo, at post #25) said — “There have been millions of digital cameras sold over the years where all you have to do is point and push a button and perfect picture. Not one clear picture of a UFO. Amazing.”
It’s not as easy as you think, getting pictures of things in the air. I have tried taking pictures of planes and blimps in the sky, with a good Canon digital camera and what you see with your eyes (and it looks like the camera should pick it up okay), it just doesn’t seem as big or as clear in the digital picture as with your own eyes.
I’ve taken pictures of blimps, which are slow moving and a couple of miles away, and they don’t turn out to be that good.
But they are discernable, right? You can tell it's a blimp or a plane? I understand the part about quality. We see all those pretty images in the magazines, post processed, and expect the same right out of the box, but I generally do a lot of black level tweaking on my pictures. I dunno, maybe I need another monitor, and anyway I save the untouched originals, but I digress.
Another problem with snapping these pictures (even ordinary planes and blimps), if you’ve got your camera in the car or in the house — you run to get it and by the time you’re back (even in less than 1/2 a minute) the thing is gone or behind a tree or cloud or whatever.
But, besides all that — there have been pictures posted on the web and other UFO websites that do show pictures that are taken. They look as blurry and as indistinct as the picture I try to take of *simple* and *ordinary* objects in the sky... LOL...
Yes, that's generally a problem, but still there have been historic images taken of many extraordinary things over the decades. PSA flight 182 from 1978 comes to mind. And there was a plane that ditched just off an island, can't remember where, which someone caught with a video camera. (wasn't it around 10 years back?)
Besides the untold amount of professional photographers, how many Average Joes all over the world on a summer weekend are out with a camera, so many with the best quality settings purposefully enabled, shooting wildlife or flowers or landscapes, etc? And there's all the video cameras. Surely after waiting for decades we'd have some kind of historical pictures of one event from somewhere. Given enough time, the odds are in our favor, yet as you've noted all we seem to get are the blurry and ill defined blobs from hucksters.
And out of all those pictures from all the decades, no two flying saucers look alike. It's as if the space aliens have a human penchant for vanity. Perhaps some fly the Andromedan equal of a Kia, others a Ferrari.
The likeliest answer is that the hoaxters are an individualistic bunch, who piece together their dinky models and snap their Polaroids and seek the glory for themselves, hence there's never been a desire to create an "underground", where Irving in Oshkosh ships his model to someone in France so that it can be photographed there, then on to England, etc.
But don't take my word for it. See if you can find anything supposedly taken from anywhere else on the planet as embarrassingly cheesy as the Gulf Breeze images. :)
Another problem with the zoom that some people have on their cameras, is that it’s not an optical zoom but rather a digital zoom and it just blurs the picture more. And in addition to that, when you put on a larger zoom on your camera, besides you getting a blurry picture just from the zoom (on the digital part), you get a blurry picture because it’s harder to hold the camera still when shooting it when on zoom. Furthermore, if the f-stop is not right (depending on your settings on the camera, or the focus isn’t fast enough or right, then you’ll get blurry pictures, too.
There’s a lot going on with those cameras to make things blurry in the sky. It’s not like taking pictures of an outdoor BBQ in your backyard... :-)
I agree as far as digital zooms go, which only the tyros would use. But some of us know not to use it. And in the last five years, especially, true optical image stabilization has trickled down to even Canon's base model, the A590 IS, less than 200 bucks. Optical IS isn't to be confused with what some shop as IS, which is only boosting the ISO and/or shutter speed, resulting in a generally inferior picture.
As another aside, my friend Quix mumbled something about "exotic ionized air flows" distorting the flying saucers skin. Then where are the radar tracks? Remember that when the shuttle Columbia went down that there were a small handful of screencaps of weather radars showing the shuttle's ionized trail?
Well, let me ask you this... how many photos came out of the Phoenix sightings a few years back? (I think it was Phoenix...).
If that’s the right place, it created such a furor over the sightings, that the city had a press conference about it, as I recall. How many pictures resulted from that one?
“Remember that when the shuttle Columbia went down that there were a small handful of screencaps of weather radars showing the shuttle’s ionized trail?”
Or the fact that we have two (so far) video clips of the plane going down in the Hudson last week. Security cameras are typically not high end quality, yet we can clearly identify the plane and it’s water landing.