> During a routine training mission in 2004, Dietrich and her then-commanding officer had noticed an unusual "churning" of the ocean surface before seeing "a smooth, white oblong object resembling a large Tic Tac breath mint flying at high speed over the water."
- by multiple fighter jet pilots (in different planes)
- picked up by the fighter jet's radar
- picked up by the USS Nimitz's radar.
So yeah...
It could all be a big prank.
Some of the eyewitnesses saw what they saw on, wait for it, a radar screen. Well technically it was another technology not exactly radar but I forget the name. [edit: FLIR, which may or may not be a type of radar… I know as much about this as I know about little green men.] But color me unconvinced.
And sure there are other embellishments to the story but we really don’t know what’s real here and what’s not.
If he built the software that automatically rejects such mistaken identifications, he also knows in which situations you'll get a false positive reading, and can tell his friend the perfect timing for the prank.
For an example of this kind of prankster game see Woz’s short videos about how he sources (actually real, but he intentionally does not say that) two dollar bills in pads from a local printer “who gets them from another very high quality printer.” He knows some people get what he’s doing and others don’t, and that’s part of the fun.
And some people transition during the exposition from being people who are being duped, to people who realize they were temporarily duped. That’s another part of the fun.
Definitely the most likely explanation. /s