Anyhow -most- of the photos taken from US Aircraft are clearly balloons, some consumer but most spying; it's a huge intelligence failure that these incidents aren't reported to the higher ups when -most- of it is clearly enemy spying. The War Zone did a few good pieces on this.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/31151/area-51-veteran-...
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/40054/adversary-drones...
As for the super high speed phenomena being observed, I have serious doubts that it is an adversary given US defense spending, so they are either secret projects or something beyond. The article (from NRO) claims the fast objects are distorted by a parallax effect but seem to ignore the radar signature showing similar speed to what is visually observed...not the speed of a bird or a balloon.
The theories in this NRO are pretty laughable to be perfectly honest in regards to some of the cases that are clearly not commercial aircraft, birds, etc as the author claims. Clearly making a joke out of what is possibly a serious national security issue in regards to enemy spying, especially. The Drive (War Zone) write ups take the issue far more seriously, and rightfully so, I'd recommend them.
Go ask a room of random people to go outside and take a video of a bird in flight. You'll see how bad both people and smartphones are at it. Add to that that most UFO phenomenons happen at night, and that people nowadays walk 99% of the time looking down at their phones.
https://m.youtube.com/user/mickword
In one example, they were able to fully explain a previously "mysterious" UFO seen in a video taken by a military helicopter in South America. Thanks to the overlaid GPS coordinates and time, they were able to create a 3D model recreating the camera's viewpoint and then overlay the flight tracking data from that day. That along with weather information allowed them to demonstrate that the UFO was in fact an IR reflection from a commercial airliner as seen through a somewhat rare but well-understood atmospheric effect combined with lens blooming. It was impressive sleuthing and very cool to see the flight's 3D track line up exactly with the mysterious blob from the helicopter's POV.
He reminds me of the Condon Comittee. In "The Edge of Reality", Allen Hynek claims that in the first week of the investigations the conclusions were already being written on the boards.
[1] https://twitter.com/4Eridani/status/1387157151232167936
[2] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/05/10/how-the-pentag...
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBt4CNHyAck
[4] https://open.spotify.com/episode/2ZFg3HmKpFf9rKvm6oaY9v?si=2...
You’d think people would put 2 and 2 together. But many will always see 5. These are the most highly instumented areas of the planet. Just look at google maps of San Nicolas island off San Diego. A Navy range bristling with the most advanced electro-optical and radar sensors on earth.
But like you say, always a fuzzy polaroid. It’s strange when forums of supposed contrarian rationalists are so herdish.
The more highly-sophisticated equipment you have tracking one area, the more likely you are to get false readings in that area, assuming the equipment has any kind of failure rate.
For a comparison, LHC has "seen" many millions of much more impressive events, with much more sensitive equipment. They don't go publishing about new particles every day though, because they know how to account for measurement flukes in their instruments.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vqI_jC_qcY
It looks a lot more humanoid or ape-like when the bear is far away or the resolution is grainy.