Flying saucers

In the TV show X-Files Molder used the phrase “Absence of proof is not proof of absence”. The idea being that just because you don’t have proof that something exists you still can’t be sure that the thing in question isn’t real.

So, can we now say that flying saucers really don’t exist since almost everyone has a camera on their cell phone and has that with them all the time?

Admittedly cell phones don’t capture lots of detail like film cameras or even low end digital point and shoot cameras do. But, even a lot of second rate, grainy thumbnail photos from the average cell phone should have begun to turn up.

Given the shear number of cell phones with built in cameras out there, we should have huge number of photos of UFOs and we don’t’. Can we reasonably infer that we don’t have that huge number of photos because there is nothing to take pictures of?

The other phrase from X-Files was “I want to believe!” and as a reader of science fiction starting in the early 1950s I do want to believe. Even someone like me has to see proof sometime and those missing photos really go a long way to convince me that unexplained flying objects (UFO) are really unlikely to be “flying saucers”.