Identifying what some aircraft in the distance is by sight, at night, is not in their training. Identifying that it is _something_ so as to avoid it, is, but identifying what it is, is not.

Patently untrue, learning to identify aircraft by shape for both IFF and situational awareness purposes is standard.

But wouldn't that lead to more situations where unidentified reports are made by military pilots than civilians? They are supposed to identify all the things in the air so when they see an unidentified one, they are very attuned to the gap between their knowledge and what they observe (often intermediated with sensors). So if they see something visually that is not on the sensors, that's very weird. Also, something with a weird path - very weird. But these could be meteorites, debris from balloons, satellite parts, drones, projectiles (somebody shooting a gun or a laser at them) ... all sorts of stuff that are uncommon enough to be not part of any training or even known phenomena.

Civilian just sees something and unless it's really weird presumes that it's outside of their knowledge area but that makes sense because their universe of unknowns is large.

So you can pick out the type of an aircraft against a black sky at night only by it's wing lights? I said _by sight_ in my comment and that was important.

Clouds, reflections of the moon, etc are things that happen at night. It doesn't have to be against a black sky.

Yes it is? You have to know if it's an enemy aircraft, and which one. You have to study each model so you know what you're up against. WW2 pilots spent a lot of time memorizing enemy aircraft silhouettes and performance details

You're not doing that at night though. The human eye isn't capable of that.

Are they trained and used to judge things not fitting to the patterns (shape, behaviour, position, ...) of human made objects? Trained in the 'impossible'? I assumed their training has bounds on how human made objects behave. When something is outside this envelope may trigger non-standardised responses rooting in personality affected anchoring to some snippets of prior knowledge. Just like for any other human being out there.

> Are they trained and used to judge things not fitting to the patterns (shape, behaviour, position, ...) of human made objects? Trained in the 'impossible'? I assumed their training has bounds on how human made objects behave.

Presumably they are trained on distinguishing aircraft from birds and weather balloons. If there is something "impossible" given that training, then there's clearly something that needs an explanation.