Watch the recreation and the eyewitness testimony videos from multiple vantage points.
https://youtu.be/PRgoisHRmUE (recreation of ONE of the west coast incident, starts at around 9:00 in)
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/27666/what-the-hell-is.... (note the embedded videos of testimonies)
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/28231/multiple-f-a-18-.... (new tech, east coast incident years later)
Or maybe I am mixing reports. I've read about several recently.
The pilots audio discussed 'seeing' the things, but it's not 100% assertained, except via post-hoc assertion by the rights owner of the video, that the pilots aren't referring to what they see on their MFDs.
I have to come out of the closet though and say I don't totally dismiss aliens. I would need a lot more evidence to make it more than a speculation, but IMHO it is not an unreasonable one. The discovery that Earth like planets are likely common makes the Fermi paradox very paradoxical. One potential answer is indeed "they are here but are not making overt contact." There are numerous rational reasons an intelligence might avoid overt contact, too many to list here...
Anyways, the only footage I've seen so far is that FLIR video from a plane showing a weird object that happens to precisely follow the rotation of the camera and behave exactly as you'd expect an internal reflection in sensor optics to behave. Given that this is apparently the only footage publicly available from that incident, I'm inclined to discount the reports that some people say they saw something on other instruments.
See for yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9D8dzl4zGk. And tell me, why would the UFO start rotating exactly at the moment the camera is about to cross 0 degrees, and persist through what looks like camera axis reorientation, continuously rotating at the rate about 2x of the rate camera axis rotates?
I'll certainly consider that as a partial explanation, but IIRC some pilots made visual contact as well.
Over and over in the articles, pilots were quoted as saying they never actually saw the UFO despite the radar sensors saying it should be right in front of them
Watch this video of a U.S. Navy F/A-18 squadron commander (not an average military pilot) who intercepted one of the objects and engaged in aerial maneuvers with it. He describes intercepting the object, flying about one mile away from it, with the object demonstrating awareness of his presence by mirroring his maneuvers. Then he flew aggressively at it, and the object responded by rapidly flying away. It then showed up on radar at the position he was returning to, where he had been flying a combat air patrol before he was sent to intercept the object, indicating that the object had been aware of his aircraft all along.
The commander also said that the flying object appeared to be maneuvering about 20,000 feet over an unknown object which was submerged just beneath the ocean surface.
Other testimony recounted at https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/27666/what-the-hell-is... mentions that the ships had been tracking these objects on radar for a few days already, with them appearing suddenly on radar at 80,000 feet, rapidly descending vertically to 20,000 feet, and then flying straight up again, disappearing past 80,000 feet. The ships went to non-drill battle stations while the aircraft intercepted the object.
The commander in the video did not describe it as being like a reflection. Why don't you watch his 6-minute testimony and then offer an informed opinion?
> flight computers tracking the glitch would plausibly show it "performing maneuvers" that make no sense for physical objects, such as the ones you describe.
This is an example of "coming up with less-extraordinary theories that contradict the evidence," as gfodor said[1], because you have asserted "glitches" in "flight computers" and ignored the pilots' eyeballs, which corroborated the radar contacts that had been observed over several days.
As for pilots' eyeballs- nothing I've read about this clearly states that anyone got close enough to get direct-eye-contact; most mentions of "visual" confirmation are talking about via cameras (and to me, the footage I've seen of it looks precisely like a camera artifact.) Also I wouldn't discount the possibility of a pilot, squinting to see a small distant object that his expensive flight equipment is insisting is there, simply hallucinating- humans are suggestible, and just as vulnerable to "sensor fusion" errors as prototype military hardware.
Radar Contact + FLIR Contact (videos) + Human Eyeball confirmation by two types aircraft + multiple eyewitness testimony != a technical anomaly nor a hallucination