A person without actual expertise dismisses numerous accounts by trained pilots who saw this first hand by Googling for YouTube explanations and calling these witnesses liars or incompetents.
Does this person happen to work in tech?
Does this person happen to work in tech?
At the end of the day, everyone is fallible -- and even the experts are sometimes surprised.
These reports can only be treated as best efforts to fit observed phenomena into an existing framework of (inherently limited) understanding. When the phenomenon is adequately oddball, you have to expect an increased level of misinterpretation. See also: doctors, scientists, infosec practitioners, ...
Clearly, this is adequate justification for collection of additional data, but it's not enough to draw conclusions from.
And the pilots say it's something they can't explain, and have never seen before, on the record. More than one account.
The problem is the writer dismisses all of this, and takes the explanation of people who saw only the video. How dismissive the writer is of other's lived experience and expertise in their own domain is what I have trouble with.
The people he is calling liars and incompetents are journalists and news media, not pilots.
I don't blame him for his anti-alien position, but his "there is nothing weird here" position is kind of unsustainable. If instead, he would say: "there is no reason to explain this with aliens" and stopped there that would be a perfect rational position.
But he solved the problem like this:
>>"Utter incompetence: It took me under an hour on the internet to find the above explanations. I looked for explanations on YouTube, and the first video I found referenced Mick West. I then looked up Mick West’s web site, which lists all his videos. That was my research."
That was his research. Mr. West also forgot to explain (in the Tic-Tac case) the pilots testimony and, if I remember correctly, the previous radar signatures from the ships.
So, a professor of epistemology solve the problem estimating his priors from how he feels about the issue, an argument from authority (because he didn't bother to check if Mr.West get his facts right) and selecting only the evidence that fits his theory. Wonderful.
If there were alternative explanations that were plausible, sure. But they tend to invoke conspiracy theories, aliens, or alternative physics. Maybe other explanations will come around that are plausible, but it is reasonable to settle on the boring, seemingly plausible explanations for now. That's not an argument from authority.
"The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' but 'That's funny...'"
Isaac Asimov
2. Your supposed "experts" are relying on equipment they do not understand that regularly produce phenomena they do not understand.
Ironically, I think you've made a good case that philosophers (experts) should be the ones tackling this issue.