[13thLetter]

I'll give you Point 1, of course, but points 2-4 apply just as well to the UFO reports. Many of them were from experienced professional pilots, reported immediately after the incident and with great detail. UFO skeptics wrote a number of books on the topic back in the '70s; they're worth reading if we're about to go through another period of people reporting mysterious objects in the sky that never quite manage to show up on photos or radar.

[manarth]

> points 2-4 apply just as well to the UFO reports

> mysterious objects in the sky that never quite manage to show up on photos or radar

You are quite right to refer to UFO reports that came from highly qualified pilots, etc. Those were reports made by highly trained professionals, with lots of detail, etc.

I would counter that by saying that pilots in that era were encouraged to report any strange/unidentified experience. So they genuinely reported anything that could add weight - either for or against - such as lightning strikes, odd cloud formations, odd solar events, etc.

And those UFO sightings were specifically things that, despite all the detail, were, by definition, not identifiable. And given the description of most of the objects, they would have expected them to show up on radar (given the described size, and the understanding of radar at the time…it's quite possible that a combination of new stealth technology and the era's radar limitations obscured this possibility).

The main difference is that all of those phenomenon were unidentified: the pilots never had sufficient detail to match their evidence to a real-world experience.

I'm sure that during that era there were also all sorts of airprox events that were recorded, but didn't necessarily have all that much follow-up since, simply because the circumstances were clear and identifiable.

In these drone reports, the pilots have clearly and succinctly identified the issue.

It's one thing to report vague lights, and suggest it may be a UFO (because there's nothing to identify what Flying Object might be causing the lights); it's a very different case to very accurately describe a drone, report it as a drone, and have strong correlation with other reports of drone flights near that airfield.

I really wouldn't give too much credence to the lack of photos or radar.

As mentioned before, the dimensions of most drones preclude detection on most radar (not that they can't be detected, but that most radar systems will filter them out as noise), and the fact that almost all commercial jets don't have a set of dashboard cams, that gives enough reason to understand why there isn't an overwhelming wealth of evidence for drone airprox events.

[13thLetter]

> The main difference is that all of those phenomenon were unidentified: the pilots never had sufficient detail to match their evidence to a real-world experience.

There were no real-world experiences of UFOs, but it's not correct to say that pilots didn't know what to expect -- flying saucers with a very specific description were a well-established part of popular culture. A saucer-shaped object at a great distance that moved quickly, made sharp turns which would be impossible for a fixed-wing aircraft, and which would eventually disappear as if it had moved straight away at high speed, was the standard description. It would have been in the mind of any pilot, and indeed exactly that description popped up innumerable times in the UFO reports.