John, great answer and contribution. I must also say how sorry I am to hear about your father. I lost mine a few years ago and I know how trying it is to go through that experience. I wish my best to the good gentleman.

You’ve raised a fascinating point: commercial airline radars do not necessarily detect geese or balloons so why postulate that Navy pilots mistake geese or balloons for UFOs? Fair point. But does the Navy use the same radar that Capt. Sully has used? Probably not. Perhaps the Navy radars can detect a lot more than the civilian radars, giving rise to the possibility of a Navy pilot mistaking a balloon for a UFO?

A second intriguing aspect: Lt. Ryan Graves and Lt. Danny Accoin, two experienced Super Hornet pilots, detected back in 2014 and 2015 unidentified objects flying at hypersonic speeds along the East Coast of the USA. They could detect and lock on to the objects in their radars but could not see them visually. What to make of it then? You say the pilots should believe in their radars and not their eyes, and I agree. But I’m still intrigued that not everything you see on a radar is also visible to the carbon-based human eye.