[Red Badger]

My guess: a foreign adversary is spying ....................

[PIF]

My guess: a foreign adversary is spying ....................

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If some foreign power had them, then we would be speaking some other language and would have for at least 100 years - the first object ever photographed was from a balloon over some New England mountain in the late 1800s. Or painted into Renaissance paintings or scratched on to rock walls ...

[Mr. K]

They should develop a shotgun shell for their weapons
you would not try to shoot birds with a rifle- you use shotgun ‘shot’ to increase the chances of hitting them

If this is a swarm of drones, then blast them

[Tallguy]

After descending tens of thousands of feet in less than a second, the object reappeared on radar 60 miles away, implying unimaginably fast velocities and g-forces. Most perplexingly, the UFO appeared at a predetermined rendezvous point known only to the aircrew and radar operators.

There's your clue. Navy ships usually will not cruise by an enemy installation/island while "emitting" so as not to betray their radar signatures. Here the navy ships are tracking with their advanced Aegis radar systems. If the navy thought that there was a possibility that these 'craft' were truly enemy recon aircraft they would probably not betray their electronic signatures and handed tracking off and gone dark. But they didn't. They monitored the UFO's while vectoring USN aircraft to verify the contacts. But the 'alien' or 'bogey' hits the agreed orbit point before the aircraft? How would the UFO know the rendezvous point? No, not buying it.

What if the AEGIS system is playing with a new capability that can project a visual & radar reflection at a distance and play with aircraft sensors as I would use a laser pen to entertain a cat? Nice capability to have when US destroyers are sliding through the Taiwan Strait to be able to confuse PLA radars and recon aircraft. Project a fleet of insanely agile aircraft in the surrounding airspace.

This looks like a test of the Aegis system to develop tactics for employment. The F/A-18 crews were live guinea pigs to get an idea how enemy air crew might react.