So how could a few people on the Internet possibly figure it out in five days?
The answer, I feel, lies with a fundamental problem with panels of experts, namely that you can't be an expert in the unknown. The list of scientists and experts from the CEFAA website is indeed impressive. There are all kinds of different disciplines there, and they would certainly be able to identify the majority of things we can see in the sky. But in this one case, the needed expertise was simply too specialized to be included in a general panel.
What was needed was someone who understood how persistent aerodynamic contrails formed, where they normally formed relative to the airport, what they looked like when viewed from eighty miles away, and how to view historical time-stamped ADS-B data overlaid on geolocated photographs in Google Earth.
In other words, they needed me on the panel—not that I'm a real expert in aviation. I just happen to have some very specific knowledge and experience in solving this specific type of case. The issue is not really that they should have had an expert like me on the panel. The point I'm making is that it's impossible to have all the experts you can potentially need on a panel. Any panel is going to be limited in the amount of domain-specific knowledge it has, so eventually, a UFO will slip through the gaps.
...
How do you close the gaps in a panel of experts? Clearly you can't just add more and more people to the panel. No, the way to close the gaps is to do what IPACO eventually did (without intending to). You ask the Internet.
Asking the Internet (also known as "soliciting public comment," "asking the public for help," or "consulting the hive mind") is a way of casting as wide a net as possible. While you might have a few dozen experts on your panel, they only cover a few dozen broad fields of study and a few narrow ones. By asking the Internet you instantly add several million narrow experts.