Apparently biased misleading unresearched article- There are several archival reports of Revolutionary War soldiers seeing bright UFO`s in 1776 flying over battle areas... I researched this for 10 years and found a lot of reports in newspapers, archived journals, diaries in Canada/USA and Native Americans` accounts via oral histories by the talkers, etc., about fast and slow flying stars, lights, etc. and in the colonies, back to 1600`s. These writer guys are very lazy, never do their homework.
In the middle ages if you saw a light in the sky, you knew it was a lantern on the end of a witch’s broomstick.
The brain doesn't know what it doesn't know
Basic research on hallucinations will tell you that the brain tries to fill in the gaps created by the unknown by substituting the known.
Regardless of what they saw, it would be no surprise that someone in the 1600's would see an aerial sailing ship or falling star where someone in the early 1900's might see some form of airplane or airship and someone in the 1960's a rocket or spaceship. An SLBM in San Diego last year had people describe seeing a worm hole. Has anybody but Morgan Freeman seen any of those lately?