I have written about this very subject in a few past blog posts, but given how prevalent the current UFO delusion is becoming, even among some reputable and very known scientists, I think it deserves rehashing.
As mentioned in a recent blog post of mine, in the last year or two the United States government has started releasing video footage of unidentified phenomena that has been caught on camera during training exercises, missions and so on, and has launched some inquiries into trying to find out what those things are, and all this has become so convincing that now even some reputable scientists, including physicists, have become "converted" into UFO believers. Many of them no longer question whether they are physics-defying flying aircraft, and their only question is whether they are man-made or extraterrestrial in origin, and whether they pose a danger to us.
Likewise I wrote how this is just complete nonsense, based on blurry videos (often in the infrared spectrum, making them even blurrier) of tiny blurry blobs that lack any sort of detail, and while they should know better, they are jumping to all kinds of completely unjustified conclusions about the nature of these blurry blobs, including assumptions about their distance, speed, and so on and so forth. They also get confused by other effects appearing in these videos (such as fast-moving backgrounds which make the blurry blob look like it's flying at enormous physics-defying speeds, when in fact it's nothing but a parallax effect caused by the object being tracked from a far distance by a high-speed fighter jet.)
The problem with scientists, government and military officials, fighter jet pilots and so on taking this seriously is that they drag regular people into being deluded as well, due to the argument from authority.
It's the same old argument heard a million times over the decades (even centuries): "He's a fighter jet pilot, not some random schmuck! He knows what he saw! He's an expert!" "He's a scientist, a physicist, he knows a lot more about this than you!" "Even military officials are now admitting that these things are real!"
This is not to deride experts and academics. When it comes to their own field of expertise I would trust a known scientist any day over some random dude on the street. For example if the question is about, say, nuclear physics, I would trust a reputable nuclear physicist more than anybody else. If it's a question about mathematics, or computer science, or biology, I would trust a mathematician, a computer scientist and a biologist (respectively) more than anybody else.
However, none of these people are experts in the field of human psychology, pareidolia, magic tricks, weather phenomena, or even photographic cameras. As unintuitive as it might sound at first, all these "experts" are actually completely outside their field of expertise when it comes to videos of purported "UFOs", and thus they are in essence no different from a random nobody schmuck with no education of any kind.
In fact, rather ironically, these experts may actually be worse than a random nobody when it comes to interpreting what's happening in these videos.
How so?
There's a saying (first written by Abraham Maslow) that goes like: "If the only tool you have is a hammer, it is tempting to treat everything as if it were a nail."
That aphorism applies here perfectly!
There's a Sherlock Holmes book by Arthur Conan Doyle which touches on this very subject. In the book at one point Holmes points out how different people pay attention to different things based on their expertise. He says that, for example, a medical doctor will immediately notice the murder victim and start looking for the cause of the death, while other things in the room may go completely unnoticed. Conversely, the long-time butler of the household will notice if furniture, which he has seen hundreds of times, has been moved from its usual location. Most details about the murder victim (which the doctor notices quickly) will go unnoticed by him.
This is quite an apt summarization of the problem.
When you are an experienced fighter jet pilot, you have been trained for years to look for, recognize and identify military vehicles (both friend and enemy). What you have not been trained for is to recognize, for example, weather phenomena or video camera artifacts. This training, ironically, misleads fighter jet pilots and other military personnel into interpreting random unknown phenomena as being some kind of flying machines or vehicles, because that's what they have been trained to do. And it misleads them to do so even more than the average person, precisely because of their training. When you are actively looking for a particular thing, you'll start seeing that particular thing in everything unusual, and miss or dismiss other alternatives.
When you are a doctor and professor of physics, when you see something seemingly defying what you know about physics, you immediately start speculating about how that's possible, and what could possibly allow such an object to maneuver in such a manner without breaking apart. You may even start estimating distances, speed, acceleration, forces, and so on and so forth, to more concretely point out how physics-defying the maneuvering is (and how, for example, a human couldn't withstand such acceleration forces).
The deep expertise of the physics professor, ironically, misleads him into going the wrong path (and does so more easily than the average person). He starts analyzing the situation using his own field of expertise, missing or dismissing the possibility that it's actually something else entirely (such as pareidolia, a visual illusion, a camera artifact, a weather phenomenon, or the geometry of the situation being misinterpreted by the viewer because it's visually confusing).
When we become experts in a particular field, our "field of vision" narrows considerably, and we start analyzing everything according to that particular field. We only see the murder victim and we don't pay attention to the furniture. Because we have a hammer, and we are such experts at using it, everything starts looking like a nail.
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