1. Phone and security cameras are good for objects in close distance. The farther the object, the worse the quality. Best example I have is that I live close to a flight path of a local airport. I've tried to take photos (with an iPhone 11) of interesting airplanes to send to my friends who work in aviation, but the pictures are usually crap. I don't have an exact metric, but I would say its something like every 1 or 2 pictures out of 10 is good enough to identify the plane.
2. There actually are a lot of modern UFO videos on Youtube and the rest of the web that you can spend hours watching. It's just that they are mostly taken with phone cameras, so your video categories will basically be: "that's clearly someone practicing their CGI skills", "that looks like trash/that's clearly a drone", "That's neat and I can't really explain it". I dug through a few popular subreddits and youtube channels last month as we saw an influx of UFO stories in the media and this was basically my experience. It's a fun way to kill some time, but yeah you aren't going to get the high quality videos you want.
This is like "God of the gaps" theology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps
The claimed phenomenon keeps retreating to exactly fit into the gaps of our ignorance. And it will always keep retreating, because filling in the unknown with quasi-anthropomorphic entities is what humans have been doing since long before they invented Zeus and Thor.
Is it possible it's all UFOs or angels or Huginn and Muninn running errands for Odin? Sure. But there is no more reason to favor one explanation over the other. And the world is full of infinite things we don't have enough data to explain.
Why is that particular bird outside your window right now? Why is it singing the song it does? One explanation is that space aliens are using it to spy on you; the birdsong is how it communicates to coordinate observations with other birds. Maybe the iPhone 11 just isn't good enough to show the construction flaws in the feather patterns that would prove it too is a UFO.
But that theory is exactly as valid as "the explanation for this video is UFOs" and we should treat them with equal weight.
With that said, I don't know how we will get beyond "that's neat and I can't explain". My belief is these UFO's are man made or natural phenomena. In order to fully explain them all, it requires us to know what is man made (disclosure from governments), and then study and understand the natural phenomena.
If this was actually aliens, then I don't think we will get past the "this is neat and I can't explain" unless they want us to. The way I reason with it is that it is the equivalent of if we time traveled a fighter jet or submarine to the 14th century. People back then would have no way to reason or prove what they were seeing unless we landed those vehicles and demonstrated to them. Even then, they would probably think the machine were a creation of pure evil or something.
Your "it could be aliens" argument applies exactly as well to fairies, angels, demons, demi-gods, wizards, Satan, time travelers, humans from other dimensions, etc. If you weight one of them more highly than the others, you should examine why. But the answer won't be in the evidence.
I like the liminal theory but this isn't the same thing.
To extend the pirate rapists example from my other answer. Maybe you'd never known a pirate that had raped a person, but I think if you knew someone who told you that story, and you'd heard other people had similar experiences, you'd certainly believe them.
Or maybe not pirates but Trump supporters. Or whatever group fit your priors for likely/payoff for you to do this. So the "aliens are not a smart possibility" here is just an interpretation skewed by the way you want to read signal in the evidence.
It's equal that we can look at the same things and come to different conclusions. That's diversity of opinion and experience. But maybe you haven't even looked at the same things. Certainly we look at them in different ways.
I believe aliens are here. But I'm not saying this Navy evidence points to that definitely. I'm saying it doesn't rule it out. It's smart to keep open to it. I'd say the preponderance of witness evidence over decades without a doubt points to that they are here. Does this evidence prove it? No to me. But I know it. It's what I believe based on my own knowledge and experiences.
You have a different belief is normal. I don't think either of us can claim to be "right" on this topic re evidence (tho about the solar system, what do you think about those weird obelisks? structures on the moon? NASA's history of censoring space photos? Lights on Ceres, on Phobos, on Luna?)
In one view, the lack of solid widely accepted data is why there's so much "meat" to be argued about, but actually I don't think that's the meat, that's just reaching the ground consensus that people will reach different conclusions and I think as long as they do so with an open mind to the evidence that's valid.
I do think you have to admit that what you say about it comes not from evidence, but from your interpretation of it. It's not proven either way, it's just your belief that it's so. And that's all that matters so far right.
This may be becoming less of an issue with the newest generation of cameras.
The answer to this is that there are infinite possible things that could be true. But until there's decent evidence, nobody is obliged to take it seriously.
Do I think there is alien life somewhere in the universe? The odds seem very good. Do I think that a bunch of them have crossed the galaxies just to spend decades hanging around and fucking with people? I don't in the slightest. The simpler explanation is that primate brains evolved to survive on the African savannas are maybe not perfectly tuned to dealing with a universe 93 billion light-years across. That all of these ever-liminal phenomena share a pretty mundane set of explanations in the evolutionary history of the human cognitive architecture.
No one's ever "obliged" to do anything, particularly about this, but "decent" is your judgment. What the decent evidence your family loves you? It's not hard data. it's a story you piece together and your existence depends on it. Far less high stakes whether or not aliens are visiting us or not, for you personally, for easier to accept or reject this belief for personal reasons.
I think something else is involved in what makes this hard for people to consider. Not sure what it is. Maybe something like ridiculous anthropocentrist arrogance? "Aliens can't travel here because we don't know how they could."
What you're doing is classic "god of the gaps" thinking. Science fiction from 100 years ago imagined aliens on Venus and Mars. From early telescope images, people believed there were canals on Mars. It was all bunk, of course. We have enough data that current live on Mars and Venus looks much less likely. So now you've pushed the little green men back to the parts we can't see as well. That's not because there's any evidence there, but because you have started with a conclusion and you're reasoning toward it.
You may say you want there to be aliens here but you're not acting like you're willing to engage with the evidence about this. You're viewing it through a preconceived idea.
Right there's no smoke gun evidence for solar residence but there's no evidence for them not being there. Circumstantial evidence for proximity to help explain the evidence that they're here on Earth.
"God of the gaps" is a biased and weird way to describe something you do every day. You have a hypothesis, you know there's something wrong, somewhere, but you don't know where it is. So you go looking. Is it in your fridge? No. The closet? No. Under the rug? Backseat of the car? No. Where could it be? Maybe you just imagined the thing. But you were so sure. But there's no evidence....But there is. You sensed something was wrong. You saw the thing yesterday, and now can't see it.
Because you have some Wikipedia page and fancy scary name for some thing that's a normal part of human thinking (and science -- where are all those particles? Let's search in other energy levels and collisions ...) then any thing that looks like that is "little green men" and "bunk"? Come on. By that logic the housemate's lost package, the smell in the living room and the bug you hunt down in your program is bunk.
You're sure there's a bug (might it not just be how you're measuring it?), and you employ a process of elimination. That you employ that process does not make you crazy...but it seems you would look yourself in the mirror and think, "I'm crazy for doing god in the gaps thinking about this bug." Or is that just what you say about others but not yourself?
I just think it's not the type of erroneous thinking you think. It's actually logical. We have a big search space, we have some signals, now go find where they originate. It's a big space, and you don't have access to any of it. If you want to sit there and say, there's nothing there. That's completely illogical. It's not even "unlikely" that there's nothing there. You have signals on Earth, and by your logic of the impossibility of intergalactic travel, the signals are more likely to originate locally.
So... just because you didn't find it on Venus or Mars (so far, but have you been there?), doesn't mean they're not here. There's a lot of places we haven't looked, and they could be there.
You may deny it but that doesn't change one iota of the reality. It's just your belief about it. "God of the gaps" cuts both ways. Every time you see a gap, "You can say, see this is more support to what I'm saying." I can say that. SO can you. It doesn't disprove what you think is unlikely. It doesn't make it more likely. People used to say Marilyn Monroe made a man more of what he was. Cocky men became more cocky in her presence. Timid men more timid. Maybe the gaps show us what we really think, not what's really there? It doesn't show you anything. It's not "god of the gaps" it's unknown in the gaps.
Only thing it shows is we're both willing to fill in the gaps with certainty. You're certain they're not in the solar system. Another idea that supports the notion that aliens visiting Earth is more likely than without them being in the solar system? You deny it. To support your pre-existing belief? Of course not. Simple because the evidence guides you toward that in your unbiased appraisal of it. Come on... You're blind to the interpretive nature of your conclusions, and still hide that in the perception that the "sensible majority consensus" aligns with your view. But that very conservatism makes you an unreliable speaker about these mysteries. What value can you add if you're not willing to engage with the gaps?
"Ah, it's a big black unknown. Leave it alone. Nothing to see there."
You're saying it's all bunk, is the bunk. Because you don't know. Have you searched every crevice of the solar system to prove there's no life there? That someone had a story that was a wrong interpretation of the data, but if true supports a 'they're here' hypothesis, does not disprove that hypothesis if their interpretation is wrong.
I'd say we don't have nearly enough data to rule it out. 'Much less likely' compared to a strawman? Still can be very likely.
You've kept the little green men out of your garden because it doesn't make sense to you that they're here. Or you felt in the past it's just too much fun for you to argue with those that believe. And you think the time is still here when denying evidence of this stuff still looks rational. But that time has passed. It now looks crazy to say the evidence leads you to stretch denials into invoking a certainty of impossibility in the face of ambiguity and lots of signal.
No. Bigfoot, as with UFOs, could exist on other planets. That's not the assertion being made with these recent videos, though. Just like Bigfoot, they're alleged to be here, on Earth.
But during that time a number of liminal phenomena have stayed liminal. Bigfoot. Ghosts. UFOs. Angel and demons. Clairvoyance. Haunted houses. Telepathy. Dowsing. Many more, I'm sure.
There are two ways to explain that. One is that all of those things have gotten way better at avoiding evidenced encounters. The other is that they are like the scary animals/monsters kids imagine lurk just outside the firelight when you take them camping: things humans imagine to fill the gaps when sensory data is ambiguous.