>Why close all those doors without sufficient evidence to close them?
Because there isn't sufficient evidence to open them in the first place. Might as well claim it is unicorns and dragons, you don't have any evidence it isn't.
Because there isn't sufficient evidence to open them in the first place. Might as well claim it is unicorns and dragons, you don't have any evidence it isn't.
The process isn't hey look at that, must be aliens.
Relative to what? Other pilots who fly the same aircraft? All fighter jet pilots in the Navy? All pilots of all types of navy aircraft?
> Simply putting your head in the sand or attempting to debunk this documented phenomena with patently absurd explanations like "a lens flare" or "it was only Venus" isn't good enough for thoughtful people.
So yeah I'm nitpicking that the poster inserted an invented fact that these were the Navy's "top pilots" to support their position while being a dismissive jerk.
He or she deserves no better.
I don't think it is an invented fact. Top is ambiguous and has to refer to >50 percentile at a minimum. A commander of a squadron of f18s in the navy that graduated the navy's top gun program is most definitely above the 50th percentile (I would argue he would be in a very elite group of pilots that is much better than just half of others).
I definitely don't support condescending comments, but you too were dismissive.
There are multiple plausible hypothesis to explain these things, just dismissing the whole conversation as not worth discussing or being impossible seems very unscientific.
The thing that bothers me the most about this sort of discussions is that it's all done on "paper"[1]. It would be helpful to actually release a balloon, or whatever object you think it was, and check if you can reproduce the glare and other sensor data.
If it's very easy to reproduce then we can be more confident in that explanation and probably nail down more detailed characteristics of that object. Once we have that we can look where this object could've come from. For example, if it points to a balloon, did a company/organization lose a balloon in that time frame? Once we have all this info we would have an explanation that's more robust than someone saying: "It might be possible this and potentially that"
This requires money, time and the hardware. So I guess it's unlikely that will ever happen.
[1] Not saying it's useless. Those calculations and/or simulations are very useful to limit the types of objects it could be.
It's very normal to not be able to prove what caused an event. This morning I heard a sound, it sounded pretty much exactly like a car horn, but maybe it was something else. We'll probably never know.
It's an excellent point that any organization serious about determining the cause would be conducting experiments, I can go honk some car horns and see if I find one that sounds similar. It doesn't seem like that happens with "UAP research", or the US Navy