Recently author Lawrence Osborne attempted to explain in The Spectator why It’s getting harder to laugh off the idea of UFOs. Here is one such incident he says needs some accounting for:

On 10 November 2004 US Navy F-18 jets operating from USS Nimitz off the coast of San Diego near San Clemente Island were asked to investigate groups of five to ten objects which were behaving strangely on Nimitz’s radars. At 28,000 feet they were too high to be birds and too slow to be aircraft. Two Super Hornets intercepted one of them. The four pilots saw a so-called ‘tic tac’ white object moving at seemingly impossible rates of climb and descent. They then observed it for about five minutes as it fell from 60,000 feet to 50 feet above the water. More importantly, it was caught on the aircrafts’ FLIR thermal imaging cameras.

What’s interesting to me is not really whether there are aliens messing about in spaceships and simultaneously messing with our heads (I honestly doubt it), but the process of working out what to believe. Osborne continues.

When lunatic conspiracy theories are debunked, it’s usually by calmly rational experts who with amused aplomb pull apart the ravings of delusional zealots who are themselves impervious to evidence. Curiously, however, the situation with UAPs now appears to have reversed these roles. The calm rational debunkers in this instance are the pilots themselves. The people who were there. The alternative theories they are debunking seem embarrassingly over-emotional. Weather balloons and Chinese drones, seagulls and optical illusions! As these pilots wearily point out, they can actually tell the difference between a seagull, say, and a machine moving faster than an F-18 then disappearing instantaneously.

What Osborne is saying here is that, yes there is a claim to witness something out of the ordinary but the rebuttals and alternative explanations are even more extraordinary. In which case, we should presume to believe the witnesses.

Well, quite.