I think one thing to consider when asking why, with all our recording technology, we cannot get awesome images of ufos, is that its kind of like a similar scenario to the natives who did not see the large colonial ships on their shores...Now I think the reality of that scenario is that the ships were anchored a ways offshore, and the natives did not immediately notice them, because they weren't looking for them...Immediately meaning that probably once they had their morning coffee and morning sex or breakfast or whatnot, they had a look around and saw those ships and said "holy shyte"...So although we have an abundance of technology to record ufos, there's just not enough people looking for them...
...
It's true that most people don't spend much time looking at the sky - I mean,
I never notice anybody looking at the sky, do you? I spend more time staring at the sky than anyone I know, and that's only because I saw a pair of unexplained bright objects zigzagging across the daytime sky in perfect formation when I was a child and I hope to someday see something that exotic again, but the amount of time I spend doing it amounts to perhaps 30 seconds per day on average (and sadly, it hasn't led to another sighting...I reckon that I was extremely lucky to have even one legit anomalous sighting in a lifetime).
But that's not the main issue, imo - the primary issue is that iPhones and security cameras and such, aren't worth a pile of poop when it comes to recording typically 30-50ft-wide objects darting across the sky at thousands of miles per hour at ordinary aerial distances which are typically in the range of many miles. A smartphone or some rotten security cam - they're simply the wrong tool for the job. If city-sized UFOs appear low and slow in the sky someday, like in
Independence Day, then we'll get some reasonably clear photos...but then it'll be too late... 0.o
CGL keeps showing us images and videos of huge meteors that light up the night sky like daytime as they break into burning streams of molten rock....and a SpaceX launch that filled the night sky with glowing plasma over a major metropolitan area for over an hour...and then he tries to argue that those events are equivalent to a 30-50ft metallic disc zipping across the sky. That's such a flagrantly false equivalence, that I used to think that he was playing dumb by suggesting that the two were even remotely comparable. I'm no longer convinced that he was playing, because even after I pointed this out, he's still making the same argument as if it's rational or even remotely based in reality.
So far the only person here who's tried to test this out, by trying to get pictures of ordinary jets passing overhead, is pigfarmer - and the attempt convinced him of the same conclusion: taking pics of airplane-sized objects at aerial distances with a smartphone is a remarkably pointless exercise. Perhaps with practice (and something to lean against), somebody could get a decent shot of a relatively slow and low-flying passenger airplane...but I'd bet that it would only be discernible because of the signature cross shape of an ordinary plane with wings and a fuselage. Anything with a centralized shape is only going to look like a blob or blur in the sky; commercial cameras are designed for seflies, not aerial photography.
The fact is, smartphones are ruefully inadequate for long-range photography. If you're lucky enough to ever see an anomalous device navigating our airspace with a total disregard for inertia and gravity, then you'll need a $3M military-grade gun camera pod with target-lock and advanced laser-guided autofocus capabilities to capture clear footage so you can prove it to anybody. But good luck pulling that off and not having your footage confiscated by the people who own that $3M gun camera pod: the US military.