One can dig up a bone. It is a bone or fossil that is direct. It may weigh 50 KG. It may be "white". Those are direct "measurements". Saying that it is the ancestor of your poodle is not a direct measurement. However you wish to characterize your sensations is of no interest to me. However, normally people consider evidence of the senses as direct. It may be erroneous, but it is nonetheless direct.
If you cannot touch, taste, feel, or see it, it is infered, your hopeful use of the word "direct" to cover up the sin of inference notwithstanding.
As you know but are reluctant to put tongue to, we do not feel or see in units of quanta--what we detect is, for ought we can differentiate, continuous streams of light. I point out that it was not until the Black Body experiments that anyone even had the notion as more than a pipedream, and a Black Body experiment is a very far inferencial remove indeed from your eyeballs.
It is, I return to avering, quite lame to reject the steps in reasoning that makes us think dino bones must mean dinos, but accept that black body phenomena means quanta. Of the two, dino bones are by far the easier to comprehend and accept.
Of course we do not "feel" quanta, feeling (except for heat) is a mechanical interaction. We "see" quanta. It is not "inferred", lest we wash down all senses into an inferred world. You would not have us smelling molecules but some other thing. What do you propose we see? It is certainly not units of bone.
What is lame consists of building up something from scratch and attributing it to another. First, dino bones are dino bones. There is no inference involved. Something is what you call it. The inference that is quite easily rejected is similar to the assertion that Mesonychus is the ancestor of Shamu.
Secondly, I mentioned nothing of black-body, however I did mention experiments that demonstrate that a rod cell is activated by single quanta.