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

Anecdotal obviously but I’m in the industry (I’m assuming you are as well from the nature of your comment) and I work with many current and former pilots and I think this characterization is a little unfair. Many military pilots do come from engineering backgrounds since a degree is generally a requirement for pilot training, and an engineering degree is often viewed as a good qualifier for becoming a pilot. Military pilot training is also highly technical in nature and involves rigorous classroom learning on the underlying physics and systems of tactical aircraft. But aside from this, my experience is that technically competent (not necessarily a given) pilots can have a better practical understanding of these sensor systems than the engineers that designed them because the designers very rarely get a comprehensive picture about what it’s actually like to use them in combat scenarios, simulated or otherwise. The problem in my mind with simply writing off the TICTAC and GIMBLE incidents as a bad reading of noise on the scope is that, from multiple pilot testimonies, dozens of tracks were observed via radar, ir/eo, and visually (like just the eyeballs). I’m not saying that these are craft that are violating the known laws of physics, I personally have other theories, but I’m not sure it’s just noisy sensors either.

Same in astronomy and cosmology. Your career will be over if you do not hold a very specific view, or at least hold it publicly.

>"satellite can seem to suddenly disappear"

And another one conveniently appears at the same point and same time just going 90 degrees different course? Sure.

I'm one of the people that believes we're being visited and that the government knows and is covering it up.

There are rational explanations I can come up with for why the government would want to cover it up. You do not want the public to panic, nor do you want the public to know that we cannot control access to our own airspace. There's also an element of this where you want to study a potential enemy without them being aware that you are aware of their presence. In other words I think it's possible that those who made this decision did not want to induce a change in their behavior by it becoming clear that we are aware that they are here. I think you also do not want your geopolitical competitors to be aware of their existence, because that starts a potential arms race in which competing nations reverse engineer their technology before we have successfully done so.

Some of these justifications fade with time. For instance, I think the chance of public panic decreases as people become less religious + more people become aware and acclimate to the possibility that we are not alone thanks to the introduction of aliens in our pop-culture / media like TV shows and books.

As for why the aliens do not explicitly and unambiguously inform us of their presence, my thinking is along the lines of this comment further up in the thread

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34665738&p=2#34667035

> It makes sense to slow roll UAP/ET phenomena anyway, as they probably understand that beings of an emerging intelligence tend to align to whatever they percieve as powerful (just as other animals become dependent on human garbage dumps) and adapt to the dependency instead of evolving and developing themselves freely according to their natures.

> The dependency arrests their development, and ethically, who wants to be around just another bunch of pets? I could see there being some distinction between domestication and actualization, where the former stunts an evolution and the latter develops and accelerates it. The more interesting question around UAPs for me is under what conditions would we elevate a species on earth to participate as peers in our own civilizations, and what would the analogous criteria be for us to level up in the same way.

There may be a philosophy that we need to develop naturally in order to not arrest our development technologically and culturally. I strongly believe that mankind has to experience the consequences of our actions in order for us to have lasting change on our belief systems, ethical views, and behavior. I believe that, hypothetically, them allowing an event like WW2 to occur or even allowing the use of nuclear weapons at the end of the war in a context that wasn't an existential threat to the survival of the species serves to decrease existential risk in the future. I think even with something like climate change which they could presumably help us to avert, they do not do so because mankind likely needs to experience the consequences of not caring about the natural world before we collectively come to our senses.

I would otherwise think that they are studying us scientifically and simply do not want to contaminate the experiment, but their apparent lack of care about being observed by military fighter craft makes me think that this isn't the case.

One of the more believable encounters (due to the sheer number of witnesses + none ever changing their story) I've read about involves an alleged landing near a school in South Africa in 1984, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariel_School_UFO_incident. A few of the children claim that the aliens in this encounter communicated with them telepathetically, sending them mental images of environmental disaster and climate collapse. The whole thing has the air of some unintended and unauthorized encounter.

The intergalactic troll thing sounds ridiculous, but everything I've typed sounds ridiculous. Trolling does seem to be supported by the evidence though. I don't remember which video it was, but one of the fighter pilots from one of the Pentagon confirmed videos indicated that after encountering one of the craft, it shot off to the destination that the pilots were headed which was something like 100 miles away in 60 seconds iirc. Our alien visitors seem to have a sense of humor, which I suppose all things considered is better than them not having one.

I don't think you should have nightmares about any of this. Even though I believe that we are being observed, it is not proven and even if it were, we can only wildly speculate what their intentions are. I take solace in the fact that they have likely been here for a very long time and our development has been unimpeded. Similarly, I suspect that to develop the technology that they have you require a stable society for a long period of time. You don't get stability if you are a particularly warlike and malevolent people. It seems likely too that the trajectory of intelligent civilization is to grow more moral and caring over time with less violence. It seems to be the trajectory mankind imo.

ATC probably thought they were giving a different measurement. Especially in older planes, systems aren't particularly well integrated, and most of the time you ask them what they're seeing because you can't check your own Mode C altitude in the cockpit and want to compare it to your barometric altimeter (and yes, they generally do use the same static source, but it isn't atypical for them to read differently).

Thinking about it more, I've never tried asking ATC for an altitude check specifically from primary radar. It may well be that the system isn't set up for it, even if it's technically computable to some degree. When I'm talking coarse, I mean an altitude spread at range that may be measured in miles.