Pilots aren't "trained observers"
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Yesterday I wrote you all about the free screening last night of my award-winning movie The UFO Movie THEY Don’t Want You to See at the SETI Institute, and while watching it, something occurred to me that I should have included. So here it is.
It has to do with the belief, popular among UFOlogists who insist that the Navy UFO videos must be alien spacecraft, is that military pilots are “trained observers.” The phrase is so popular among the UFOlogists that it’s become something of a joke among the skeptics.
In the movie I interviewed a senior flight instructor and an air traffic controller, both of whom confirmed that identifying other aircraft is not a part of pilot training, because it’s simply not important. Pilots, including those who later move into fighter planes, are trained to constantly look for things in the sky — with the sole purpose of not hitting them. I would have loved to get an actual military fighter pilot or flight instructor to confirm this, but active duty personnel are not allowed to discuss their job in movies (at least, not without a extremely torturous permit through the DoD’s Entertainment Media Liaison office in Los Angeles, which I failed to get, because I’m not Tom Cruise with a major studio distribution deal.)
However, since the film was released, I’ve heard separately from two guys who are current F-18 fighter pilot trainers. (Off camera, they can talk about their job in private, as little of it is classified.) Both told me their curriculum does not include a single mention of “observation training” or anything in the neighborhood of that.
Edit: And since this post went live this morning, I’ve had another email from reader Jim: “As a former Air Force pilot, I can confirm what you say in your latest post. I have no doubt that there are "spotter" jobs that require observing and identifying aircraft (at least in WW2 movies), but there's no such training for pilots.”
Yet, UFOlogists stubbornly cling to their belief that military pilots are “trained observers” and thus it’s essentially impossible for them to be mistaken about things they perceive in the sky. In their world, pilots are immune to optical illusions, and to the geometrical limitations making it impossible to judge size and distance without triangulation.
So, here’s a good analogy, which I would have put in the film if I’d thought of it: