Why Look at Flying Saucers?

Let's say we believe with confidence that this debunking is correct and that these videos show a bird or balloon or some explainable phenomena.

The next step is to look at the eyewitness testimony and reports from the people involved in this case - several Navy fighter pilots including a commanding officer of a squadron of aircraft onboard the Nimitz - and decide if we think the likely outcome is that they 1) did see radio signatures of these 'birds or balloons' moving at speeds beyond what is possible according to our understanding of physics, 2) were they collectively deluded or mistaken or misled by software bug across multiple technologies (radar including the AEGIS radar of an American aircraft carrier fleet), or 3) were they all lying.

I don't think any of the debunking address the possibilities of these witness testimonies, only the video that we do have. Which sort of makes sense in that we only _can_ address the physical evidence that is in front of us as members of the public, but shouldn't we at least acknowledge it seems somewhat unlikely that several members of the Navy with thousands of hours of training onboard both fighter jets and also in the radar rooms of Destroyers all collectively believed they were seeing physically impossible maneuvers by multiple targets, or that these tracking systems are that unreliable, or that they all collectively decided to lie about these videos and make up a story? Dismissing a video as showing a bird or balloon subject to parallax is great, but those explanations fall down if we choose to believe the report that they had radar tracking these objects at impossible velocities.

Perhaps the lying is the most logical possibility if this is a planned piece of government disinformation / muddying of the waters around technology or UFO/UAPs for some strategic reason, but let's at least discuss the topic before saying 'it was a bird or balloon, slam dunk, case-closed'.

And then I better understood the stupendous energy requirements for a two-way trip to even the very closest neighboring solar system. And it is just not practical, even for a civilization at the end of the technology development tree.

We might see one-way probes, but they are as likely to be a part of hegemonizing swarm, looking to convert all usable matter in the solar system into computronium. Certainly they're not going to just faff around, kidnap a few people and then leave quietly.

When aliens visit, everyone will know. Luckily, we haven't seen any evidence of Kardashev type-2 civilizations nearby, so we may be good for a while. Though that's also sort of depressing, as it is weak evidence that life is not too common across the galaxy.

Not good.

My best alternative explanations is:

top secret research project going out of their way to fool everyone, possibly with the help of a few pilots and radar operators :-)

How do we know what the end of the technology development tree looks like? There are just so many mysteries that remain within our current understanding of science, we can’t say for sure that it’s not easy (for example) to bend space time or some other possibility that makes faster than light travel possible. Quantum entanglement, for example, breaks many of our assumptions about the impossibility of FTL travel.

> When aliens visit, everyone will know.

Maybe, but perhaps a civilisation that has survived the great filter would look differently at civilisations they stumble upon. Maybe, like we do when searching for microbes on Mars, they would try not to disturb the life they discover.

This is all just speculation of course, but I think when looking at this topic it’s all too easy to apply a human centric view on what’s possible and what’s not, and the truth is we just know so very little. Or, we know a lot, but there are so many more mysteries than solved problems.