[shadowgovt]

I've known a few Navy pilots. I absolutely defer to them in all questions regarding keeping a plane in the air, getting it safely on and off the ground, and denying those capabilities to others. On questions of what a weird thing they saw in the sky might be, I give their knowledge just about as much weight as anyone who sees a weird thing in the sky.

The first thing we teach pilots is that they have to get comfortable with the fact that their eyes play tricks on them in flight. Our visual perception wasn't tuned for high speeds, high altitudes, and truly three-dimensional relationship assessment, and they're as prone to misinterpretation of things they didn't train on as everyone else is. If they say "That blob is a fighter-jet near the horizon's edge," I believe them; but if they say "I think that blob is a space alien," I don't because nobody knows what a space alien looks like (and "That doesn't look like anything I know" still doesn't imply "space alien").