birds were round back then
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Really another conspiracy theory? Everyone knows birds aren’t real
/s
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I’d argue that cameras are arguably worse than 30 years ago. Small lenses, digital zooms, tiny sensors.
We might have immeasurably more, but they’re not great at capturing what a UFO is - fast, sudden, oddly and poorly lit.
I’ve seen several UFO/UAP. Even if I had a camera at those times, I wouldn’t have had time to get a shot.
One (that was probably an airplane tbh) I have video of, but it’s on an old laptop and the hard drive is erroring out. My film camera never had sector errors.
Greg Brady has also stopped hoaxing his siblings, so that probably figures in as well
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If you’re talking about phone cameras, maybe, maybe not. But there’s a whole world of imaging beyond that which the average consumer uses, and it’s leaps and bounds ahead of the capabilities of three decades ago.
And in any case, the point is that no matter what the capabilities of the imaging system, the UFO, if it’s not an obvious hoax, is always at the instrumental limit of visible intelligibility. If it isn’t, it invariably ends up being a simple FO rather than UFO. The correct inference from this is that all “UFOs” are mundane phenomena, imperfectly perceived.
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That first image is a scene from VALIS, right?
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pretty sure it’s commemorating the invention of mini-golf
what do you know about the renaissance that you aren’t telling us? 
if you don’t have all the names of the angels committed to memory, doesn’t that mean they are ufos?
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Well, of course god is a UAP.
I’ll get out ahead here and assert that god is also a conspiracy theory.
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Those aren’t UFO’s, those are skybeams. Jesus was an Avenger!
Because logic.
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Well to be fair they had paint for hundreds of years and we’ve only had cell phone cameras for fifteen.
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Crivelli: Well let’s see you paint an interdimensional portal, wise guy.
And tbf it was Crivelli, so most of his attention was on ensuring that the cucumber and apple in the foreground were perfect.
UPDATE: What I like most about the “Annunication with St Emedius” is that Crivelli credited the architect of the imaginary building with including a wee peephole up in the frieze, so that the Laser Beam of Impregnation can shine directly onto the BVM without having to reflect off conveniently-located mirrors.
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Ergot is a hell of a drug.
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It’s the kind of light, so say proponents, consistent with those reported in modern-day alien abductions
The absence of mutilated cattle in the paintings makes their claims less compelling.
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So the question is: Does the writing of that time describe what these might be in reference to? Can literature shed some light as to what the thinking of that time was and why these images were painted as such?
Sure they saw stars back then, the sky looked the same… but they didn’t have our modern knowledge to explain what they were seeing… so natural phenomena and weather would have been confounding to them. 1,000 years from now we’ll laugh at how little we actually knew. just like we mock the ancients.
Same with sea creatures… those were described in some fantastical ways but in the end were just the same dolphins and giant squids we know today.
Having said that, when cultures have references to Gods mixing among the populace, then rising high above in flying machines of metal with lights and smoke, doing battles in the skies… that is unsettling.
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IMO it’s pretty easy to explain this: people consistently underestimate human creativity and interpretation. Those sea monsters? Sure, to some degree based on real things. But also? Exaggerated and twisted to tell engaging tales in highly oral storytelling traditions, and those exaggerations were themselves based on people interpreting their experiences based on deeply held beliefs of living in a world filled with magic and unknowable, unseen, monstrous creatures. It’s well established that our beliefs affect our perceptions in very significant ways, so if you truly believe in magic and wondrous things existing, that’s where your mind will go if it perceives something odd. And people with time on their hands make up the wildest things - whether for fun or to try and explain things. That isn’t a modern phenomenon.
As for smoke and metal in the sky? Metalworking has been among the most advanced technologies humans have had for thousands of years, both for utility and ornamentation, and is a persistent source of fascination. Smoke has been a portent of power and destruction for all of known history (and likely as long as humans have existed, as fire tends to kill us). If myths are anything to go by, the sky and flight are persistent sources of fascination for us as well - likely because we can see them so readily yet they are entirely outside of our abilities (until recently, that is), and flying ships/vessels abound in myth and legend (likely due to fata morganas being relatively common at almost any populated coastline). IMO it would be exceedingly odd for someone living in a world that they see as magical and inexplicable to not mix these together into some myth or legend. It’s just another combination of things they knew of with some imaginative magic added. Add to that the likely prevalence of hallucinations, whether intentional or from fevers and illness (and humanity does love hallucinogens!), and you’ve got a potent cocktail suited for a thousand-year game of telephone to create some mind-bogglingly fascinating stories. That some of these tales seem to align with modern myths or technologies? It would be more surprising if they didn’t.
Oh, and the sky really didn’t look the same, at least not at night. The difference in how the sky appears pretty much anywhere in the world today due to light pollution is downright shocking. Even 200 years ago, walk outside at night and you’d be treated to a visual spectacle literally out of this world. Again, hardly surprising that people saw the sky as magical and full of unknown wonders/horrors.
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