As a US Navy fighter pilot, I witnessed unidentified anomalous phenomena

Well, if you distill it, it's perfect for HN: Imaging/artifacting/tech issues (interesting), some country has technology that is beyond next level (interesting), Aliens (interesting).

Flying saucers appear throughout art of basically all times, the most obvious being [1]. World War 2 pilots reported foo fighters which could be a natural phenomenon but may be related to UAPs.

But let's assume they are human. Why would a country keep this tech secret instead of shouting about it to demonstrate their total superiority? If China had it they'd have invaded Taiwan by now. If Russia, they'd have Ukraine. If the US it must be such a deep black project that those running it haven't called Biden and said "Joe, it's us. We're trying to keep it secret. Can you shut up about it?" But none of those things have happened.

Now imagine there wasn't a sigma around aliens. We all know that statistically we can't be alone, but "where is everyone?" Maybe they've been here all along which is why SETI missed them. Or their tech makes ours look like matchsticks and we'd never detect them because they're so far advanced.

I'd say we're either looking at sensors that malfunction so significantly so as to make artists from a few hundred years ago paint UFOs, or they aren't us.

This stuff should be investigated with an open mind, even the possibility of aliens.

[1] https://www.cantab.net/users/michael.behrend/repubs/j_geoman...

Frankly, I think the reality is even less interesting than that. US military aviators are trained to be proficient systems operators, but typically (and, I want to stress, very reasonably) have little or no education in EM/EO theory, and don't always understand the assumptions that engineers baked into these systems to optimize them for their primary use cases (which, in the case of targeting pods, is identification and targeting of surface objects--air-to-air capability was something of an afterthought). Knowing a little bit about how these systems work, I think it's pretty obvious why targeting pods wouldn't be able to focus properly in these kinds of circumstances, and how their built-in tracking heuristics could lead to wildly inaccurate conclusions even by well-intentioned operators and analysts.

I can't speak for the radar data, as I've never seen even leaked radar page footage from these events, but for those of you out there who think that what you see on the scope is a perfect analog of the real world, boy do I have some bad news for you...

It's also interesting to me that every single one of these videos I'm aware of has come from what's generally regarded as the least capable and most error-prone targeting pod currently in US service.

This comment - interesting though it is - has irked me.

To me it's sometimes amazing the lengths people will go to in order to insist something they can't believe must be because another party is at best mistaken, or at worst lying.

The article states that UAP were likely - in the view of the author who is speaking from personal experience and knowledge of incidents and people involved - witnessed by 50-60 people "every day".

The unclassified material records UAP from multiple sources including naked eye and two completely different sensor technologies - radar and infrared.

And yet, here we are. "Maybe there was just a glitch with the sensors".

No. No glitch. No sensor malfunction. No lone guy on weird meds.

Every day, UAP are being witnessed by credible, trained witnesses from multiple sources, and are not being mitigated because people fail to take them entirely seriously.

The article states that this is a major national security problem for the US. Too true. If these start appearing near a Russian ICBM silo, do we entirely trust - without figuring out what they are - that they aren't going to trigger a nuclear war?

It needs to be taken seriously. Hand-waving it away as mistaken people or flawed equipment despite professional men and women insisting they have already discounted those factors is an embarrassment to their professionalism and candour. It takes guts to talk about this.

And let's just remember these aren't tinfoil hat wearing stoners: they're service people sworn to protect their country screaming out "hey, you need to look at this, because we can't mitigate for this, and it's dangerous".

However, this isn't new, it's been culturally normal for decades.

If I told you that one USAAF officer who had served at Roswell Army Air Field at the time of "the incident" in 1947 had since come forward and said "Look, I was scared about losing my pension so I didn't say anything at the time, but the truth is there was a cover-up, and we couldn't really identify what that thing that crashed was but it wasn't ours and it didn't seem Soviet. People were scared because that base was the largest base for the Strategic Air Command, and admitting that weird unidentified objects could just get into airspace around there and we couldn't do anything about it would have terrified the public", you'd think about it and go "sure, one guy, not buying it entirely".

What if I told you ten individuals had all come forward - some with death bed confessions - and without evidence of collusion and for no payment or reward (not even a TV interview), had said similar things? What if they categorically insisted the updated explanation - not a weather balloon but an early warning radar system - was also not viable, because they were familiar with all those systems and this wasn't that?

What about a hundred ex-service people? A hundred accounts like that, some of them notarised statements to be released after their death? Or made shortly before last rites when they knew the pension couldn't be withdrawn? Would a hundred people doing that make you think "glitch" or "human error"?

The actual number is just over 600 right now. Seriously, _six hundred_ people have insisted that there was a significant security threat that never really got resolved, and about a dozen of them attest to life forms they couldn't really describe as human being present at the site.

Perhaps that's all too much for you, so go look at the "tic-tac" videos again, and wonder why highly trained aviators who are used to seeing weird weather and foreign aircraft and drones all the time are now constantly saying "this is not normal".

It's taken 70 years to get to the point where we can start talking about this a little more openly. Let's not close this debate down again now.

Is any of it ET in origin? Probably not. Tic-tacs might be drone tech. Roswell might have been Soviet after all. But we'll never know if we don't start showing a bit more curiosity rather than reflexing to "probably not real".

What's the consensus on the most plausible rationale interpretation for these sightings?