I mean, that too. Most people have no idea how much signals processing goes into producing a functional radar.

When this technology is finally declassified and we go all Star Trek, the first thing I'm going to do is find a farmer from a moderately advanced industrial alien society, and give him an interstellar digital rectal examination. Then I'm going to find the grey aliens and demand mine. I've been waiting for so long that I'm starting to think it's now by special request only.

I mean, I'm not disputing that fact that we might be talking about a physical object. But if an object disappears from radar and then reappears 50,000ft away in under a second, through an atmosphere, with no sonic booms or plasma trail? That tells me there are two objects that are capable of avoiding sensor detection at will. To put it in perspective, an object traveling that fast is going at roughly twice the re-entry speed of the space shuttle. Anything physical traveling that fast would be blindingly obvious for miles, and the kind of technology required to move that quickly (just think of the acceleration) and avoid those atmospheric effects might as well be magic from where we're standing. The powerplant alone would be miraculous by our current standards.

I think this being multiple objects with some kind of active stealth technology is even more likely when you consider that aviators are mainly going to look for an object in the vicinity of where their sensors tell them the object is, all while moving at 600 knots, probably upside down. The bar for confusing human sensory systems isn't particularly high.

I mean, sure, it could be aliens, but at that point you might as well also consider that it could be interdimensional Nazis. Or lizard people from the center of the Earth.

I wrote about this above, but that's roughly double the re-entry speed of the space shuttle. A physical object traveling Mach 40 through an atmosphere would turn the air ahead of it into plasma, which would be visible for miles. If an object disappeared and showed up elsewhere instantaneously, assuming that the object is actually physical entity and not some kind of illusion, the simplest explanation is that there are actually two objects with the ability to confound your sensor systems. The first one has gone stealth, and the second one is showing you where it is.

The challenges of time travel are at least as hard as traveling to distant stars and planets. Even if you ignore the fact that you need to figure out a way of traveling backwards through time, the Earth's (hell, the galaxy's) position is constantly changing with time. This means that in addition to traveling through time, you also need to travel through space to get to your target destination, which requires covering interstellar distances. I.e. you run into the same problem as with interstellar travel, but now you're also adding time travel on top.

Even if it were a system that's capable of confounding an entire air group, it would still be more a more likely explanation than aliens. In fact, I think it's downright probable that a dedicated team of researchers given the task of creating a system for confounding and confusing an air group (even an entire fleet) could come up with ways to do so. That kind of capability would be a huge advantage over an enemy force, and would continue the trend of the US developing technology that hinders an opponent's ability to fight, while maximizing their own.

The simplest explanation for a single vehicle breaking physics is that there were multiple vehicles all along, and the pilots / systems operators weren't aware. It seems to me that aliens is far less likely than some kind of active stealth drone that can be used to disrupt enemy sensor systems. This is especially the case given how difficult it is to estimate the speed of an object when you yourself are traveling at 600 knots, probably upside down.

The fact is, an aircraft traveling ~60,000ft/s through an atmosphere with no sonic boom or heat trail is physically impossible. At that speed, the air in front of the vehicle would be plasma, even if the vehicle itself is completely impervious to heat (a quick head calculation tells us that that's around 15km/s, which is somewhere in the vicinity of Mach 40 at SSL -- that's almost twice as fast as shuttle re-entry, in much thicker atmosphere than what the shuttle goes through at that speed). You would literally need to exit reality in order for this to not be the case. If your target disappears from radar and instantaneously reappears in a different location, that's a good indication that you actually have *two* targets, and the first has managed to confound your sensor systems, while the second is now letting you know where it is. I think this is made even more likely given the fact that the pilot is primarily going to look for the object in the rough vicinity of where the aircraft's sensors tell them the object is.

I mean, I could be wrong. Maybe it is aliens and I'm just a silly cynic. That said, I'll always defer to Occam's razor where possible, because the probability that it's aliens is unquantifiable. That would be the black swan event of all black swan events.