I worked as medevac nurse years ago and had an opportunity to see a lot of planes zip by us from all size ,speed and distance ..you can clearly make out plane from something anomalous ,airline pilots have so much more experience watching crafts and if the pilot reported cylindrical object ,you better bet your last dollar this exactly what they saw and not a plane of any size ,speed or distance. This is what they do for a living ....
That is funny... my Copilot one night... he said traffic 12 O'clock, sure enough there was "traffic", I looked at the light, it was Mars. He insisted it was traffic (another plane, or something), so I said Nav (the crew navigator), that is Mars rising, right? The Nav decided to tease the copilot, and said no, Mars is not up... the copilot now thinks he was right, a planet, aka Mars, is "Traffic"... he watched it for the duration of our eastbound navigation leg, as the Navigator practiced celestial navigation, less than two hours, then back to base. Mars was up, the Navigator played the Copilot, and Mars was traffic, but we did not have our UAP/UFO spacecraft that can make Mars traffic available that night.
Yes, we pilots are great, perfect, the best... I have to admit a medevac nurse might be better at identifying something than a pilot.
Pilots are not special, USAF pilots spent hours of instruction on Physiological training, some did not pay attention, and none are immune to the issues we learned in Physiological training.
Maybe the copilot thought Mars was moving, and forgot this "The
autokinetic effect (also referred to as
autokinesis) is a phenomenon of visual perception in which a stationary, small point of light in an otherwise dark or featureless environment
appears to move. It presumably occurs because motion perception is always relative to some reference point." It was covered in our Physiological training...
We perceive what we want to believe, and an airliner is not allowed to deviate to get a better look, unless ATC authorizes. The Airliner was stuck on a course, at an altitude and not able to get a second look, follow, or maneuver. I suspect it was a perception issue.
Perception... sometimes the golfers on the course behind our house appear like they are only a few feet from our property line as we look past the shrubs and trees from the living room, yet they are 25 to 50 feet away from our yard. What eyewitnesses see is not always accurate, or useful. This was exactly what I saw, and I was not going 450 knots true, and the golfers were not zipping past.
