The key question here is not if these stories are true, or what the objects may be. The question is... Why does the government want to bring UFOs to the fore at this time?
Listen to "The Daily", the NYTime podcast. They just had an episode titled "A Secret U.F.O. Program".
The reporter describes how she first came about the story. Apparently the guy running the program in the Pentagon felt that they had reached a critical mass of evidence and witnesses but the department wasn't being taking seriously and couldn't be talked about.
I was wondering that too -- also in the news recently, the "interstellar object" that for some reason has attracted enough attention to scan it for "alien life", whatever that means.
CDR Fravor was a simulator instructor of mine when I went through training a decade ago. He was also featured in the PBS Special “Carrier” a few years ago.
Somehow ends up in the limelight over and over! His callsign is most certainly NSFW.
He did look very familiar. Now I know why. I remember him saying near end of the series that he was retiring instead of having to take assignment that would have him pilot desks.
I can give my own example of an utterly astonishing gob-smacking sight which turned out to have a fairly simple explanation. I invite people to speculate on what it was...
About 7am I was travelling in a ferry on Sydney Harbour about 400m east of the bridge. I saw a giant (50m diameter?) golden glowing ball hover on the other (west) side of the bridge. It was definitely not on the bridge. It maintained its position for over 30 seconds.
It was the reflection of the sun in an airplane's cockpit window. The airplane was actually maybe five kilometres away but the extreme brightness played with my sense of distance. The window must have been flat for the reflection to be so bright.
It didn't appear to move because its speed north relative to the bridge matched my speed south -- i.e. the line between me and the airplane crossed (just west of) the bridge at the same point for a long time. The point of reflection must've been tiny. But it was right on me. I suspect no-one else in the ferry saw what I saw. And it must be extraordinarily rare for the circumstances to be maintained for so long. The illusion disappeared after the ferry and airplane made their turns.
The bigger point here is that if you have people self select and report visual illusions it would be amazing if you didn't hear about something inexplicable.
So all this stuff about UFO sightings means about zero.
