But the UFOs that matter, the ones like the Tic-Tac, which allegedly:
- have no lights
- reflect minimal sunlight
- move erratically
- accelerate rapidly
- have small angular size
(In passing, where does the "reflect minimal sunlight" come from? Where does Fravor claim it had a matt appearance?)
So the Tic Tac has small angular size now? This is an important claim if you're arguing
...cameras are mostly useless to record such objects, because the UFOs are always very far and happen to be too small to be registered with precision
Because in the "
Hypothesis: Fravor's Tic Tac was Kurth's FA18" thread, you stated
...the pilots saw the object visually. Fravor encountered it at close range...
Using his estimate of the UFO being the size of his plane (50, 60 ft), at 20.000 ft it would take up 0.14 - 0.17 angular degree of sky or about a third the size of the full moon, sufficiently large to visually pick up details.
(The possibility of Fravor's percept having much smaller apparent size was raised, you seemed to disagree).
So large enough for details to be seen by eye, but not large enough to be captured on camera? How does that work?
Why do warplanes carry gun cameras and (depending on role/ mission) highly expensive cameras for reconnaissance?
Why are there well-resourced military units, whose work is often highly confidential, dedicated to interpreting imagery captured by military aircraft, drones etc.? They could just ask the pilot. -Presumably they
do ask the pilot/ aircrew, or read their reports, but it is beyond reasonable doubt that photographs/ filming can capture details that aircrew didn't see/ didn't attend to/ didn't remember or consider relevant.
Military aircraft have carried cameras since WWI- even the crude cameras of 1914-1918 captured more than a human could reasonably see, remember or describe.
People do sometimes photograph rare birds or butterflies in flight, interesting aircraft and (much more rarely) bolides/ re-entering space debris, other fleeting events when they were not expecting to see them. Often those images reveal more information than the photographer's testimony.
They are evidence of something, and show something that can be identified (or at least described).
Many, probably a large majority of such opportunistically snapped photos/ videos
are indistinct, but not all.
With UFOs, they
all seem to be indistinct- historically it seems the clearer the image, the more likely the chances of a deliberate hoax.
It has been commented elsewhere on this forum IIRC that reported UFOs in the 1950s-1990 or thereabouts were structured "nuts and bolts" craft, sometimes with portholes, doors, landing struts, ladders; nowadays they are featureless "orbs" or "Tic Tacs". Amazingly, alien tech has
just about kept ahead of our ability to photograph it, just as it has
just about kept ahead of our military aircraft's ability to intercept them- Thomas Mantell's propellor-driven P-51 Mustang, subsonic F-94s during the 1952 "Washington Invasion", Iranian Air Force F-4s in 1976, Fravor and co.'s F/A-18s.
They're
just out of reach. They don't want to declare themselves, but they're not averse to being seen by pilots (or else ET radar/ other situational awareness is inferior to our own, allowing them to be surprised and approached by the non-stealthy aircraft listed above).
And there's the issue of reports of large, slow-flying and hovering UFOs. Why are there no unambiguous photos/ videos of those?
Like the nuts-and-bolts UFOs of earlier decades, they have fallen out of fashion: Their presence is now inferred from seeing featureless lights in the sky which the observer believes are physically connected. Shame they never appear in daytime near anyone with a camera.
[Quoting drone operator Wanderlei Zandona] He also ruled out that they could be drones, since none of the objects displayed propellers, arms, or any visible signs of propulsion. "It's a ball. Literally a ball," Wanderley says during the video that went viral.
So the Serra do Rio do Rastro video is good enough to rule out propellors/ rotors/ wings, so is claimed to show something anomalous, but not good enough for details to be seen?
Again, we are heading into unfalsifiable (and therefore unscientific) territory: Photos/ video are not good enough to rule out extraterrestrial craft, but they are good enough to rule out mundane explanations.
I'm not at all sure if the video shows drones or not, but there
are drones of disc-like or spherical appearance, whose propulsion might not be obvious from a distance:
(L-R, top to bottom) Sikorsky Cypher (Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sikorsky_Cypher); Unmanned Cowboys' ATLAS UAV (Robotic Gizmos website,
https://www.roboticgizmos.com/spherical-unmanned-aerial-vehicle/); Robert Michelson's experimental Dragon Stalker (x2); Razvan Sabie and Iosif Taposu's ADIFO drone from Romania (x2, Flyer website
https://flyer.co.uk/romanias-real-flying-saucer/, also C4ISRNet
What could a military do with this flying saucer?); Singapore University of Technology and Design's Spherical Indoor Coanda Effect Drone (SpICED), MDPI
https://www.mdpi.com/2504-446X/6/9/260
With the exception of the Sikorsky, these are all products of independent inventors/small companies and university departments.
Apart from being proof-of-concept demonstrators, they might have little practical use. I'd guess they all fly slower than what is seen in the Serra do Rio do Rastro video,
if that video shows objects of equivalent size (which we don't know).
But we know these discoid and spherical drones exist- and must have been built with relatively modest resources (excepting Sikorsky's Cypher).
We also know much larger aerospace and defence interests and some government agencies, with access to large development budgets and technology as advanced as we know of, are developing drones/ UAVs.
Brazil's Embraer isn't Lockheed or Boeing, but it manufactures sophisticated aircraft and has resources greater than the inventors/ university department whose drones are shown above.
"Embraer and the Brazilian Air Force sign MoU to develop unmanned aircraft", Air Data News website 23 April 2021
https://www.airdatanews.com/embraer...-force-sign-mou-to-develop-unmanned-aircraft/
If the Serra do Rio do Rastro footage shows modest-sized flying artefacts (which I doubt) they are not pulling any manoeuvres or flying at any (estimated) speed that rules out drones of terrestrial origin.
The drone /UAV hypothesis might be unlikely, but it might be more likely than those elusive alien spacecraft.
