"What if... Just a thought experiment.. That not everyone who sees UFOs and takes a photo, is a lying hoaxer?"
First of all, let's make a big difference between people who report seeing UFOs and people who come up with UFO pictures. I have met many people who have seen UFOs - some quite close-up. They mostly keep to themselves and rarely want the attention from strangers that their accounts would attract.
But when we talk about UFO pictures, we talk essentially about highly publicized pictures where the picture - not the account - takes center-stage and becomes the focus of endless debate.
As I have pointed out in previous posts, it's very rare that people who come up with UFO pictures started out with any ill-intent. They usually start out just hearing about UFOs, happen to have a new camera and a roundish object in their surroundings. They try something out just for fun and then find that the picture or pictures come out better than they had expected. They show it to friends and then, hey, why not submit it to the local paper...
It's all innocent fun - not any intent to "fool the public".
A lot of these people after some years eventually admit they faked the pictures. Take Alex Birch for example. He not only admitted his picture was a hoax but showed how he did it. There are many others who have admitted their pictures were not real. Just in the last few years, the most famous picture taken during the Belgian UFO flap - a picture that had been declared authentic by some local scientists - was revealed to be a hoax by its author. Again, there was no ill-intent. Triangular UFOs were in the news, he was intrigued and tried to make a model of one and then took a picture of it. Same as above, the picture turned out much better than he had expected . So he submitted it to the local UFO group (SOBEPS), to the papers and suddenly, he was a center of attention. Great fun !
So here is my viewpoint: When we discuss UFO pictures we inevitably come up with names that have become associated with them over decades. If I say Trent or Heflin or Birch and yes, Adamski or Meier or... Ed Walters, everyone in the UFO community recognizes them and may want to debate whether they are real or not.
But there are so many UFO accounts over these same decades that are much more likely to be real than any of those UFO pictures. And yet we mostly ignore them. So in my view, UFO pictures distract away from the real phenomenon. Yes, some UFO pictures may be real. But the many I have seen have been mostly unconvincing. It may be that there are some... But they never have been published !