[stouset]

I’d be floored if the radar data didn’t back this up. A carrier group would have scrambled fighters well before anything unidentified got within a hundred miles, much less ten.

Visual confirmation I don’t find remotely compelling. Besides the notorious general unreliability of human observers, humans simply cannot distinguish between small, nearby objects traveling slowly and large, far objects traveling quickly without additional contextual clues (e.g., a tiny plane-shaped object in the sky is probably the latter). Factor in that they were validating their observations against a sensor displaying a misleading image—in other words, providing incorrect contextual clues—and I think it’s not hard to call into question the accuracy of any visual claims.

[bostonsre]

It was picked up on radar over several different days and a training mission was scrubbed so that they could go investigate what they saw on radar.

You don't think humans could get better at judging distance of objects with practice? It seems like if any humans on earth could reliably do it, it would be seasoned fighter pilots that have thousands of hours of experience doing that exact thing.

[stouset]

We fundamentally don't have the hardware capable of doing it. So we use context clues and intuition. And both of those can easily be misleading.