[ben_w]

At that level, trust and skill are specialisms, not generic statements.

By analogy, I'm a skilled software developer, graduated 2006, learned to read from a Commodore 64 user manual etc., but I make iOS apps, put me on a Rust project and don't even know the syntax.

I trust a fighter pilot to be really good at spotting potential hazards in the air, and also things which are not responding to the appropriate IFF signals. While I know too little about what they do to guess much of what else they're good at, I suspect that suggesting they're too good to make mistakes is like suggesting I'm too good to write bugs.

[nprateem]

No, but in aggregate, I trust them to be able to collectively say "something weird is going on". 100+ ex-service personnel testified in front of Congress about UFOs interfering with and disabling nukes in siloes over several decades. Can't find a link ATM but it's on Youtube somewhere I think.

[ben_w]

"Weird" describes far more options than just ETs.

My dad worked in the defence sector, on IFF transponders; Plessy when I was young, Marconi bought them out, I think his division was bought by BA around the time he retired. Not sure who before Plessy.

But I digress: one of his stories was about a light in the workshop that would not switch off. Eventually they got a technician in, who saw the switch did nothing to the light, measured the thing with an ammeter and confirmed that the switch both worked and was connected to the light, traced the wires to the light and confirmed they were the only ones.

Nothing made sense. The light stayed lit even without power.

He took the light out of the fixture and the light stayed lit.

Weird story, right? Can you work out what was going on from that description? My only hints are that it's a true story and that it wasn't aliens.

[nprateem]

Exactly. If something's weird, it should be investigated. Not curtail the careers of people who do report it to discourage others reporting weird things. However, when those weird things are backed up by multiple sensors, and relate to multiple objects flying in formation maneuvering in ways far beyond technology we know about, there are only a few possibilities, and they should all be seriously considered.

The US government/military (and probably still large parts of the secret side) has been actively FUDding over the years (e.g. curtailing careers of people who report UFOs, project Blue Book), so you have to weigh things up on the balance of what evidence you can find. Short of little green men landing in front of a news crew, some people won't accept anything, even now the US is admitting to investigating them.

[ben_w]

> and they should all be seriously considered.

They are. And the various airforces have always investigated unidentified flying objects simply because that's literally the point of having an airforce.

This generally comes in one of three conclusions:

1. We had a secret research project all along, and thanks to codeword-level classification the people who spotted our secret planes/drones/method for interfering with our own sensor data had no idea it was us all along.

2. Same but it was a foreign project.

3. Systematic flaw with our sensors or lack of general knowledge because the tech is new. (My dad had a few examples of that, one of which had the punchline "turns out the moon doesn't have an IFF transponder", another time it was "until they sent up the interceptors to check on them, we didn't realise geese ever flew that high").

Care to guess about the light? Another hint: no battery.