Think you've seen a UFO? Congratulations, but you probably haven't.

[reACTIONary]

https://wapo.st/4fryu8r

The rising panic over mystery drones swarming the skies of Mid-Atlantic states reminds us that, in the centuries-long hunt to identify UFOs, humans are usually the weakest link.

America has real national security challenges in the new era of unmanned aerial vehicles in warfare. But an invasion of mystery drones over New Jersey isn’t one of them.

As it turns out, just as eyewitnesses often bungle the details of, say, a car accident on the corner, we are notoriously unreliable when it comes to identifying and reporting UFOs. A huge percentage of “sightings” turn out, upon investigation, to be the planet Venus or other surprisingly bright astronomical phenomena; people on the ground regularly misjudge distances in the sky so that even objects miles away are perceived to be close by.

https://wapo.st/4fryu8r (No paywall, but you may have to register an email address)

[Dennis Donovan]

1. From the article:

There’s a reason people who are serious about studying UAP are trying to get humans out of the reporting loop: At a congressional hearing last summer, Ryan Graves — a former Navy aviator who had his own experiences encountering UAP and now leads an advocacy organization called Americans for Safe Aerospace — proposed a more reliable alternative to the grainy, black-and-white (but supposedly revealing) photos that dot the internet: sensors. Similarly, Harvard astronomy professor Avi Loeb, one of the leading voices in UAP studies, argues that we need to far better understand what a “regular” sky looks like before trying to determine what’s “anomalous.” As Loeb told me last year: “Trust in data. People are a waste of time.”

While this is a good rule-of-thumb for anyone who researches UFO's, the human sightings during this drone "phenomenon" have given us more info than technology has (so far). Of course, the human-sourced info might be largely erroneous. But, until they deploy detection technology to the areas where the most sightings have taken place, the human data is all we have (and why the debate rages on).

That's why I'm still drone-agnostic - we just don't have the data yet to definitively identify what the hell these things are that people are seeing.