Brian: I've answered that question further above in the thread. This is repeating it all perhaps too briefly/simplistically, but the Sussex officer was asked a series of questions by a journalist, including a hypothetical possibility. His answer wasn't the best and the 24-hour media immediately leapt on it and took the story in a "new" direction for a while - surprise, surprise - until a Government Minister rightly issued a rebuke. I saw the original interview "live" in its entirety and watched the resulting misinformation balloon into a mess. It should be used as an example to teach psychology students (and PR students) what can and does go wrong if people are loose or inexact with the facts.
The two US journalists who famously worked diligently to expose Watergate many years ago have subsequently despaired at the dumbing-down of present-day journalism. In small ways, I have been misquoted by journalists; in one case, for example, she made up an international airport that I was apparently flying into that simply does not exist. (Supertramp could easily have alternatively named their classic album "Crisis? What crisis?" as "Sloppiness? What sloppiness?")
And out of the 93 "credible" sightings, two thirds of these were by professionals - with members of the public, including passengers, reporting the other third. (There were approximately another 25% of reported sightings that were deemed "less credible".)
And once again I make no claim whatsoever that there was no drone only that we are seeing a rash of "drone sightings" that don't result in any confirmation. And, as I've said, also repeatedly, the idea that a pilot or police officer is an expert drone observer is, frankly, laughable. Pilot reports his plane was hit by a drone -- turns out it was a plastic bag. In the case I mentioned earlier about a wildfire in southern Utah a year or so back where numerous reports of drone sightings over a couple days had aerial crews grounded but there was never a drone captured on video or pictures and no person was ever caught in spite of the fact there were many reporters with cameras and the area, sparsely populated as it is, makes hiding harder. When folks are asked to keep an eye out for drones and they see a Hawk half a mile away what do they do -- well, unfortunately, they may well report seeing a drone as that's what they're looking for. The same goes for pilots and police around an airport.
When UFO buffs head out along NV-375, AKA the Extraterrestrial Highway, in search of, well what else, UFO's, is it any surprise that the lights they see in the sky are deemed to be visitors from another world?
In the early to mid 80's, in the upstate NY area known as the mid Hudson Valley, there were a prolonged series of UFO sightings and I personally witnessed them a half dozen times. The sightings always occurred right around dusk and what was seen was usually described as a Chevron craft. Again, I saw it myself 6 times. My first sighting was on my way back home after visiting my mom and as I turned south onto 9D in the town of Hughsonville I saw the chevron thing in the sky and moving eastward. I pulled off the road onto a side road, shut off my engine and got out of the car and as I looked up I could barely make out about 6 objects with a small amount of relative motion between them. It was just a bit too dark to see anything more than that but the other thing I noted was what sounded like a small plane at quite a distance.
Over the next 3 years I witnessed the event 5 more times and in a couple of them it was just light enough to discern, barely, that there was a formation of small aircraft flying in formation -- the whole thing was a prolonged and very effective hoax. Here's the thing ... the area was home to several of the largest IBM facilities in the world and there were many reports from "IBM engineers" that went into great detail about how it had to be an alien craft and that as engineers they were not going to be fooled. Well, they were fooled, every stinking one of them.
Brian