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.

If the phenomenon is intelligent, it does not appear to be concerned by crowds seeing it. If the 1952 UFO sighting over Washington DC[1] is to be believed, this phenomenon exposed itself to millions of humans twice over the federal capital. Another example is the 2006 sighting at O'Hare in Chicago[2] where the vessel appeared to ascend through the clouds and leave a hole in them.

In light of that, what is puzzling is that although most of the Americas is populated by humans who have carried portable video cameras in their pockets for over a decade, we do not see any visual evidence of such public phenomena. The reported sightings are nearly exclusively from pilots (but never smartphone-carrying passengers) and the military.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1952_Washington,_D.C.,_UFO_inc...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_O%27Hare_International_Ai...

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.

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.

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

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

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.

> 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.