Lastly, we also have to accept that this is a unique situation. Unlike other "conspiracies" this has thousands of credible eye witnesses, very senior people (in a position to know) saying this is a very real phenomenon.
What we do not have is evidence.
Credible people can be mistaken (and often are).
As we often find when we check the evidence.
Or we find that people's convictions come from being briefed by believers. One of the witnesses cited, a retired minister I think, made claims and got quoted by believers who thought he had inside knowledge. Turns out, he just read a book on UFOs and believed it.
Look for evidence.
It's quite different from Bigfoot or flat earth. So that's where I start from. Anything is possible, not "only what we know about is possible".
That's where we disagree.
Could the man in front of you in the supermarket checkout line be a lizard person? Anything is possible!
But the fact that there's a man there is not evidence that lizard people exist. Because he can just be a human doing his shopping, and that explains the evidence.
Can we be sure? We haven't done a CT scan. If it's an alien robot, it might spoof a CT scan to hide its internals, right? Anything is possible.
But we're not concerned with the possible, because imagination is the limit for that. We're concerned with the explainable. We're not going to start believing in lizard people because they're possible (and because we've watched a TV series in the 80s), we'll believe it when we see evidence that cannot be otherwise explained.
The double slit experiment advanced science because it could not be otherwise explained. (I think we still don't know how fields work.)
So when someone sees a light in the sky, and it's possible that it's Venus, then that's where our journey ends. Because now we know something is possible that we know exists, and that's not exciting. That's the debunk.
You can still say "it might be a UFO/aliens/NIH", but you're now in the "it's a lizard man" position with insufficient evidence.
Could the Navy videos show "flying saucer" UFOs? Sure.
Could they show something mundane? Definitely, they probably do.
The fact that people are still talking about them is either because they do not understand the latter, or because they want to believe in the former.
As long as you're saying "there could've been a UFO directly between the video camera and flight 1168 to New York", you're in the "I want to believe" group.
And there are Starlink everywhere,
we know where the flares are, and they are not "everywhere". They are towards the sun, at a specific angle, which narrows their position to a sun-sized spot in the sky at any specific time, if they're visible at all. Sitrec predicts where it is.
but many of the sightings "feel" closer to witnesses
and research has shown that we suck at judging distances when we don't have scenery for reference.
and the Tedesco's proved that some of their objects were a lot closer.
no, they didn't.
They didn't have the radar going for their light in the sky in the one paper, and they never got pictures of the radar glitches in the other paper.