Flight characteristics of anomalous unidentified aerial vehicles (2019)

I think this neglects the training and capability of the pilot to the point of being insulting. You're basically saying that a (let's say) 15 year veteran of the U.S. Air Force can't tell the difference between a small drone and a plane, doesn't understand basic physics / optics, and when uncertain, assumes that anything observed must be a plane because "all we see are planes". Preposterous.

Also, even if that were the case, it's pretty hard to explain away when the same object is being observed from multiple angles, with multiple humans, and multiple high precision sensors, with all observations confirming the same conclusions.

Here's two beliefs/points of view that are compatible:

1. There's a very high chance there's life out there in the universe. There may even be intelligent life, too.

2. It's unlikely extraterrestrial intelligent life will be able to reach Earth. Most reports of UFOs are either made up bullshit or the human brain finding patterns where there are none. Or simply classified military tech. Or people craving attention.

Not one person that laughs at fake accounts of alien abduction and probing does this because they are afraid of coexisting with alien intelligence. Instead, they do it because fake accounts of alien abduction are hilarious.

I'd argue that humans are tribal creatures, and that we don't need a reason to "other" people. On the contrary - our need to "other" people drives the creation of reasons to do so if necessary.

How would such RF and laser equipment spoof sensors that are thousands of feet in the air and moving at hundreds of miles per hour and moving in unpredictable ways? Radar is off the table--that would presumably have been detected, right? How would our spoofer spoof multiple sensors, separated by significant distance? Remember that some of these events involved multiple aircraft and ships, all of which saw the same data on their sensors. How could the spoofer engage all of these targets without its physical presence being detected by the various players, with all their various systems constantly searching?

Spoofing seems possible, but it seems like some kind of pre-planned hack would be the least offensive flavor of that particular theory. But even then, some of the pilots swear they saw these things with their own eyes (sometimes multiple people in a single aircraft, sometimes multiple people in different aircraft), which casts doubt on the whole 'spoofing' idea.

Of course, the most likely answer is that these reports are some simply untrue. If someone has an impossible story that you can't independently verify, there's no good reason to believe them.