Now that a lot more people carry cameras, what with them being built into many cell phones, are there a lot more UFO and/or Bigfoot pics? How about Nessie and Champie?
Even though I don’t think aliens are visiting Earth, my belief was that most were not faked pics, but pics of actual terrestrial things in the sky.
If the ubiquity of cell phone cameras didn’t result in a significant rise of UFO pics, this could indicate that the majority of them in the past were purposeful fakes. If they were simply cases of mistaken identity, surely the increased number of cameras would result in more of these mistaken identities being photographed?
Of course, there’s other reasons why increased cameras might not equal increased UFO pics; perhaps they are actual alien visitors, and they are losing interest with us, or losing better cloaking technology, etc. I consider that highly unlikely, IMHO.
Or maybe, people are just less gullible these days.
Or, there are actually a lot more of these pics these days, but I just haven’t heard of it.
Good point. When something does happen, like a terrorist attack, the pictures from the camera phones start popping up like crazy. But pictures of UFOs aren’t.
I suppose your real point is that there’s nothing there to see - a point I agree with.
I am absolutely certain that UFOs exist. I saw one once. It was most definitely an object flying through the air and I was unable to identify it, and I know beyond all doubt that I incapable of identifying it.
Not so much that there’s nothing to see, but that maybe most of them in the past were purposeful fakes, as opposed to honest failures to identify the object as a terrestrial object.
People want to believe in UFO’s. But they also want to avoid looking like fools.
So they only see ‘evidence’ that fits the specific technology and social expectations of any given time.
In the 1950’s people saw flying saucers, (in black and white, with no lights), which moved at the speed of an airplane. Photographs were proudly shown as high-tech proof.
In the 1970’s ( color TV, and Star Trek) ,they saw larger UFO’s with lots of colorful flashing lights, which moved at high (warp?)speed. Videos were proudly shown as high tech proof.
In the 50’s (cold war era), encounters with aliens were impersonal, and spoken of in military terms of foreign invasion. By the 70’s (after the hippie revolution) ecounters were intimate, & involved sexual touching. By the 90’s, (after child abuse became a permissable subject for TV shows), alien ecounters involve abduction.
Now, we have a new technological “problem” for the UFO believers: computers.
With Photoshop in every home, simple pictures are too easy to be accepted as proof.
So, surprise, surprise, the OP is right–there are fewer UFO’s being photographed
There being the airport, or there being one of the lights, or what? It was a flock of ultralights and we went out over the Hudson, round bout Croton Point. It was like five years later I ran across the UFO claims, and allowing for exaggeration, it pretty much had to be us.
I believe the most well-known supposed photos of Bigfoot are from one short sequence of amateur movie, and this one incident has, AFAIK, been thoroughly debunked as a hoax. Thus one actual Bigfoot photo would be a lot more than currently exist.
Since there is no central clearing house for submission and validation of supposed UFO photos, it would be rather difficult to determine whether there are more now being submitted than before. I would say not, for one simple reason: a large proportion of ‘UFO’ sightings consist of nocturnal lights. Cell phone cameras at present are mostly relatively crude devices with low resolution and no or little zoom capability. A distant light in the sky will likely end up as nothing more than a blurry, washed out spot of light on a cell phone image.
I disagree, for the reasons already outlined above. Photographic evidence alone seems unlikely to ever be enough to prove or disprove UFO’s as vehicles carrying aliens; it has always been possible to fake a UFO photo, and such fakery is easier than it has ever been. At this point, IMO, only a gen-yew-wine manufactured alien artifact, or alien organic material, would be sufficient evidence to convince most people.
Sure, “unidentified” by YOU. I’ve done some UFO faking in my time… If it is an artist and you give me the details, I could probably give you rest of the artist’s M.O. Of course, there are quite a few (not popularly known) experimental aircraft which I have often salivated over on paper - I would love to actually see some of the effects I’ve predicted.
I have been trying to put myself in a situation to obseve ball lightening, but I still haven’t had a chance to see this phenomenon.
However, one time, recently, I was driving in an ideal location to see above-cloud plasma discharges during a severe lightening storm (eg sprites) – that was freaking cool! It took me a minute to figure out what I was looking at during the periodic above-cloud flashes.
I definitely saw Ball Lightening once. It flew right past my head. It was at my Grandmother’s house in New Jersey. My Grandmother, my Uncle and I all saw it. It flew in through the screen door straight up the staircase and out an upstairs window at the top of the stairs. I have no way to prove it, I don’t know how it works, but I definitely saw it, and we were all pretty shocked by it. (Pardon the pun)
As for UFOs. I always thought that it was funny to hear people disputing the existance of objects that fly and are unidentified.
chappachula Robert Anton Wilson actually talks about that phenomenon in “Cosmic Trigger: Final Secrets of the Illuminati” and describes how the sightings fit the cosmology of whatever time period that it’s involved in. Like way back in biblical times they talked about Angels in their wheels of light. That was something that I actually gave a lot of thought to prior to reading that book even, how Angel/Alien sightings were very similar in their descriptions throughout history, but the change was updated to fit the cosmology of the culture that was interpreting whatever it was that they experienced. I think even in the Hindu Vedas (Which I haven’t read I am just repeating what I have heard) that the Gods are supposed to fly around on discs of some kind.
