That being said, having all sorts of pilots and radars report flying objects in the sky, crossing air space boundaries as they like, going close to both civilian and military crafts, really should provoke massive investigation and massive public awareness. It doesn't!
Why?
We don't have evidence that it's causing a lot of aviation accidents. If you have a high prior for the observations being caused by some sort of extraterrestrial activity, then it probably merits serious investigation, but if you just file it with all the other "I don't know" phenomena, there's nothing to single it out as meriting massive public awareness.
We don't know what causes ball lightning. It's weird and mysterious, and it's been observed for hundreds of years or more, and we really don't know what's up with that. If we figure out what causes it, it'll lay a longstanding mystery to rest, but it probably won't revolutionize the way we live, we'll just be less confused.
As a scientifically inclined individual, I'm curious about lots and lots of stuff. I'd certainly like to know about the reasons for some of these allegedly extraterrestrial observations, which I don't know how to explain. But one thing that's incredibly frustrating is when people fixate on particular unexplained observations, and insist in the absence of good evidence that the explanations must be revolutionary and life changing. When people read about things like the faster-than-light neutrino observations at CERN, or unexplained observations in the night sky, and act like anything short of a paradigm shift in our basic picture of the universe would be a ripoff, it's really disheartening, because most unexplained observations just don't turn out that way, and it's sad to see people refusing to be satisfied by the way reality actually works.
Recently I've been struck with a belief in Aliens being present on this Earth. It happened after I watched this documenary (and subsequently several others). My feeling of belief is not particular interesting in itself - I could be lunatic or otherwise psychological dysfunctional. What I'm interested in knowing is to what extend other people, who consider themselves rationalists, feel belief in the existence of aliens on this earth, after watching this documentary. Is anyone willing to try and watch it and then report back?
Another question arising in this matter is how to treat evidence of extraordinary things. Should one require 'extraordinary evidence for extraordinary claims'? I somehow feel that this notion is misguided - it discriminates evidence prior to observation. That is not the right time to start discriminating. At most we should ascribe a prior probability of zero and then do some Bayesian updating to get a posterior. Hmm, if no one has seen a black swan and some bayesian thinking person then sees a black swan a) in the distance or b) up front, what will his a posterior probability of the existence of black swans then be?