How often we hear from the breathless alien UFO believer, “I know it wasn’t a military or a civilian airplane, so it must have been a UFO!” as if those were the only two choices available by which one might explain a flying object. Just as often we are assured by the believer that the UFO in question “wasn’t anything made by man.” This is an incredibly cocky and self-serving assumption to make. The believer often falls prey to the logical fallacy devised by Arthur Conan-Doyle who purports “if you've eliminated all the possibilities, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the answer.” What makes this a logical fallacy is that one must first know all the possibilities in order to eliminate them. This is simply not possible. How many UFO witnesses know all the possibilities? Does any single person know all the possibilities? Characteristics common to believers is a grand disinclination to simply bear not knowing what ‘it’ was, and to fill in that unbearable blank with the believer heart’s greatest desire: alien space ship. This is an incredibly colossal leap of logic, and the record of total failure by the current field of ufology to produce tangible evidence of an alien presence on Earth is one result of such specious reasoning.

What to do then?

What we can do is add to that list of possibilities to be eliminated. Here are some different ideas, with website addresses and company or organization names, that describe a small number of various types of aircraft, all but one of which actually exist in working form, and are currently in our skies. Check them out to see how easily they could be misidentified as UFOs. Keep in mind that many UFO sightings are reported by pilots and other witnesses as 'unknown aircraft', meaning they saw a terrestrial aircraft of some kind, but were unable to identify it by manufacturer or nationality. It is the sleazier UFO organizations who lift these so-called “unknown” cases and re-label them as 'UFO' sightings. This terminology was not used by the original witnesses -they saw a craft they couldn't identify, but never thought it was anything odd, and certainly not anything extraterrestrial.

Please review the list of aircraft I’ve provided below, and bear in mind that I am not saying these various craft are responsible for all UFO sightings, though I am certain they are responsible for a great many, but rather, consider the fact that there exist an immeasurable number of experimental research craft in our skies, most of them secret, and that no one witness could ever pretend to be able to say with any certainty that, “it wasn’t anything manmade!”

You've no idea how prevalent UFO hoaxing is, particularly among science and engineering students at various colleges around the world. Visit this web site, see exactly what sort of reports come from it: overflite.com
(The reader is cautioned that fire balloons constitute a genuine fire hazard)
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rotaryrocket.com

Go and see this highly maneuverable rocket, which also has the capability to hover. It exists and is test flown regularly around the SW USA, and probably elsewhere. Corporate security has kept it a secret till lately.
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Royal Aeronautical Society - Human Powered Flight Group

A human powered, ultralight-like light aircraft. Interesting because they are common, they fly without sound, and they are oddly shaped -characteristics that will lead inevitably to misidentifications. Plus, wherever you find individual humans flying, you will also find some frequency of hoaxing of UFOs going on. UFO hoaxers are commonly ultralight pilots, general VFR private pilots, sky-divers, hang gliders, etc.….as well as engineering or science students.
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Scaled Composites, Inc.

Go to web site, click on "Projects", and on the left side of that page, take a look at three aircraft in particular, listed among other more ordinary looking aircraft: DC-X, Eagle Eye, Freewing, and Pegasus. Either by its appearance or by its performance characteristics, each of these craft could be easily misidentified. These craft exist and are in our skies.
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CUFON website article: The Flying Disc: Air Intelligence Digest (1954)

Does it exist? Who knows? Very interesting -even if it turned out to not exist. It would damn sure explain a great number of UFO sightings, obviously.

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VTOL: Vertical Take Off Aircraft - The M400 Skycar

An existing aircraft intended as a prototype of the future personal travel vehicle, the replacement for the automobile. It flies. It exists. Check out these characteristics:
350mph cruising speed
Seats 2 adult humans
Weighs 2,400 lbs
Approx. 18 ft long x 9' wide x 6' high (about UFO size)
Climb rate=7800fpm (feet per minute)
30,000 ft flight ceiling
900 mile range
Low speed capability
Hovering capability
Low noise

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Remote Control (RC) Aircraft
Here are some descriptions of RC aircraft currently in development, and currently in our airspace. These are not proposed craft –these are existing craft I’ve seen on film:

One is a flying saucer shaped, like a thick pancake, about as big as a grown man's palm, maybe 5-6" across, powered by a small, very strong electric motor, and is remotely controlled through an onboard camera! It can fly very fast on a normal flat trajectory or it can 'near-hover' as they called it -not quite a motionless hover, but with a slight forward motion. The designers are projecting it for use as a surveillance device by police and military. If police had a hostage or terrorist situation and needed intelligence, they could send in this little flying camera. You could swat it down with the palm of your hand -if you could catch it –it is incredibly fast, and I've seen dragonflies bigger than this thing.

I also saw a small jet rocket device about 12" tall, 5" across, and cylindrical in shape, like a flying Quaker Oatmeal box. It doesn't have the traditional single main jet coming out the bottom or rear, it has at least a dozen separate smaller jets at various points, placed so as to counterbalance each other’s thrust, and synchronized with a remotely controlled onboard computer. This thing can hover, but not like a helicopter with its pedulous sort of bobbing motion. It hovered completely and entirely motionless in midair, which made it look almost fake because we are so accustomed to seeing that little bit of wavering which typifies the flight characteristics of the more familiar helicopter.

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There exists an entire classification of aircraft you seldom see presented as a possible explanation for an unidentified flying object despite flight characteristics which would make them prime ‘suspects’. These are called “TVC’s”, an acronym for “thrust vector control” aircraft, and are described as jet aircraft, usuallya jet fighter, which can change the direction of its jet thrust in mid-flight. Modern jet fighter aircraft are incredibly fast. In addition, these TVC’s can fairly quickly 'stop' in mid-air, and tumble to another attitudinal plane, literally changing directions in mid-flight at a point in the sky, as opposed to the traditional long sweeping banked turn made necessary by the need to avoid engine stall or excessive G’s. Witnesses unaware of this aircraft's capabilities and flight characteristics would readily rule out conventional craft as an explanation for it, and the pre-set mind of the believer would definitely pronounce its capabilities as beyond that of conventional craft.
Here are some examples of the TVC type of jet aircraft:

Sukhoi of Russia makes the Su series:
Su27UB, Su30, Su32FN, Su33, Su35, Su37

I believe there is a F-15SMTD (demonstrator) with TVC and a YF-22 as well.

I've seen only the Su35 on live action film, but it is impressive to say the least.

The demonstration video I saw offered an up close vantage point, and you think you're about to watch a pilot eject or die as the jet just stalls, hangs in mid-air, then starts to tumble out of the sky, and then………WHOOOOOSH…….it's gone, no problem.

At a distance, the jet is screaming across the sky, then it seems to stop very quickly, in very little to no space, in a seemingly impossible maneuver, then it just takes off screaming away in a whole new direction. The considerable distance it actually requires to slow and change direction is visually minimized when the observer is at greater distances, and I could see how the whole maneuver could be misidentified as ‘impossible’ for conventional craft to perform.

Thrust vector control craft have undoubtedly been misidentified as UFOs, the only question is ‘how often?’
Take a look for yourself at:
airforce-technology.com

Doubtless, there are some of you who may recognize some of these aircraft, perhaps most of them, but how many of us can honestly say we knew about all of them prior to reading this article? How likely is it that the typical UFO witness knew about all of these possible explanations and could reasonably rule them out? More importantly, how many other aircraft exist of which we know nothing?
Just some food for thought for the next time someone breathlessly and authoritatively claims that "it had to be a UFO -wasn't any known terrestrial craft!"