But you can't freak out about the disclosure and remain credible. They have radar, IR, and photo evidence of these phenomena. It might be something other than a software glitch. However, I expect that "aliens" is probably a lack of imagination.
They have two integrated software suites that synthesize data across multiple vessels, aircraft and other datapoints and display them for all members of the suite. They've been attempting to integrate what they have even closer. So if enough sensors agree that there's a "something" at 12nm traveling at 3000kt, aircraft within 2nm of the signal trace are given a visual indicator of that "something." The whole controversy is over the creation of false bogeys. If I had to guess? Someone is pushing the UFO narrative in order to make Raytheon look bad. Because obviously you can't publicly say "Raytheon's system is so terrible at integrating that it's showing us tictacs traveling at 20,000 mph" without violating a whole lot of security protocols.
They have radar, IR, and photo evidence of different events... not the same one. In fact, in the "big one" posted by the Navy last year, the pilot can be heard communicating with his Hawkeye (I assume) above. Pilot is telling the Hawkeye crew what he is seeing, and the Hawkeye isn't seeing it at all on their systems. I have no horse in this race. Maybe teenager aliens do flybys of Earth on a dare, once in a while. But for that to even be a possibility, it would still require the physics of the universe to be COMPLETELY different than anything we have ever conceived of, measured, or observed in the universe and all of our sciences. I'm opting to stand on the "science" side of this line, for now. I'm willing to have my mind changed, but nothing I have seen so far warrants it. And I was with the Desert Rat on the outskirts of Area 51, worked for NASA, and have friends both in secret military weapons programs and commercial spaceflight companies.
I agree that aliens doesn't make sense. I have a hard time believing that the military would compile and study glitches in such a unconstructive way. A glitch would be the first suspect in every case. Are they really consistently entertaining unknown technologies before ruling out a glitch?
I used to work for a company called Sterling Software. We were a government contractor that provided computer tech people to agencies like NASA. I was a SysAdmin for Macintosh computers, at the time, and worked for Sterling, at NASA. When budget crunch time came around, the Sterling Software contract was "renegotiated". Sterling wound up losing the bid to Volt Technical Services. So on a Thursday, we were all laid off and told to go home. (About 20k people.) On Monday we got a job offer from Volt offering us our old job back, at slightly worse terms. There's no company that has 20k skilled people sitting around waiting to be deployed to manage the servers and infrastructure at NASA. So we would go through this same performative dance every year or two. I worked with people who had been at NASA as a contractor for 20 years, and had been employed by 15 different companies. The only way you get invited back every single time is to be completely irreplaceable (hard to do, but not impossible) or completely inoffensive... you don't rock the boat... you keep weird things to yourself and don't raise your hand when you see problems. I am absolutely positive there is a development team within Raytheon who identified this issue before it happened, and know exactly why the pilot saw what he thinks he saw. They know which subsystem is having the issue, why, and how to fix it. But I'll bet the issue is where two systems come together and need to communicate with each other, but each system is written by a different company. Neither one wants to claim ownership of the glitch, but both know it exists, and it is going to take a joint effort to fix it. But the problem is rare. And collaborating with another company is hard. Especially if - by bringing it up - you are going to highlight an issue with the system that could potentially have pilots shooting live rounds/missiles at invisible spectral software glitches. That's quite a big issue. And someone isn't going to get their job offer letter when contract renegotiation Monday rolls around again, if they rock this boat and bring this issue to the fore. Much better for people to think it's aliens. I'm with Ockham's Razor on this one.
The base commander in charge during the Titan missile explosion made the observation in Command and Control that military culture is "fire whoever acknowledges the problem."