The word ‘certainly’ in that sentence is itself misleading. None of the evidence that has been presented so far is ‘certain’ proof of anything except the unreliable nature of evidence.
Hastings repeats a variety of reports from nuclear missile sites, but his evidence is a long way from being reliable. Here is a long list of things Hastings gets wrong.
Similarly, individuals working in medicine and pharmaceutical research are constrained from revealing what they know about cheap, universally effective cancer cures, because they’d be ostracized and driven from their profession. 
And the free-energy researchers.
The use of lasers by the military does explain a lot of the hard to explain cases IMHO.
How far away can that point be? “Range is a function of the optics. The bigger the mirrors, the farther the range,” Law said. A five-inch mirror creates the effect about one kilometer away; an 8-inch mirror, about five kilometers, he said. “They’ve created plasmas at 20 or 30 kilometers,” he said. “This is the first non-lethal weapon that could go out tens of kilometers.”
The Kerr effect, a term that refers to minute changes in the refractive index as a result of electromagnetic field changes, makes it actually easier to create the effect at a distance.
That was from 2018 BTW. The video they write about is no longer available, but a good primer can be seen from “Curious Droid”:
From creating virtual flash bang grenades for crowd control, to guiding lightning or a high power electrical current to a target up to 100 or so meters away, to creating fake radar images and heat signatures from jet aircraft to trick radar systems and guided missiles that the plane or missiles, to talking plasma balls and possibly the source of recent UFOs sighting that can apparently travel at incredible speeds and perform maneuvers and stops that are unheard of by man made aircraft, this is the world of laser induced plasma.
I don’t see that as comparable, not even a little bit. Losing a clearance, a military career over any number of indiscretions (a long list) is very common and has been for a long time. UFOs were definitely not something to bring up if it can be helped.
Eh, not during World War II presumably. Allied fighters saw some strange things over Europe they termed “foo fighters”, and thought maybe they were some sort of experimental or secret weapons by the Axis. Luftwaffe pilots saw them too, and thought maybe they were new Allied weapons.
I agree most incidents or sightings have conventional explanations. Not all of them though, and the government for its part has been secretive.
Ball lightning, and this explanation was old already. Laser use matches a few of the “hard to explain” new cases.
It’s likely that there would be much different responses by military higher-ups to:
factual, sober reporting of an unusual event that could (for instance) represent spying by a potentially hostile entity, and
insistence that an unexplained aerial phenomenon constitutes an alien intrusion that is being covered up for unjustified/nefarious reasons.
Nope, definitely not ball lightning. Nor “swamp gas”. They knew what they were looking at, they were familiar with ball lightning.
I thought reporting weird things was a way to get fired from the military?
That shows a bit of ignorance because back then the phenomenon was many times assigned to imagination or misunderstandings. AFAICR researchers then did not take those sightings seriously, not just for being an unlikely phenomenon, but because of the pedantic reason that it did not affect the planes nor the pilots.
It was not pilots the ones that came with what was, more likely, what they did see.
The postwar Robertson Panel cited foo fighter reports, noting that their behavior did not appear to be threatening, and mentioned possible explanations, for instance that they were electrostatic phenomena similar to St. Elmo’s fire, electromagnetic phenomena, or simply reflections of light from ice crystals. The Panel’s report suggested that “If the term ‘flying saucers’ had been popular in 1943–1945, these objects would have been so labeled.”[2]
It was in more recent times that evidence of what mechanism caused those could be observed.
https://pubs.acs.org/jpcafh/article-abstract/117/39/9931/1594431/Further-Insight-into-the-Nature-of-Ball-Lightning?redirectedFrom=fulltext
Yep.
In theory, plasma is not dense enough to reflect radar waves but depending on the energy put into creating the plasma voxel, the supersonic shockwave that creates the bang will create a change in air pressure that radar can detect. This is because it alters the density and refractive index of the air, affecting how radio waves, which radar uses, to propagate through it and detect it.
Now, with the observations of the Tic Tac and other unidentified aerial phenomena or UAPs over the assigned military testing areas and observed by US Navy aircraft in visual light, infrared and radar and performing such high-speed manoeuvres that defy everything we know about flight in air, might these actually be a highly advanced version of what we have seen to create instant incredibly realistic aerial decoys that look like real craft, of whatever origin.
(From the Curious Droid video that clearly was not seen because your reply was too fast to see that part.)
I may be over-skeptical, but I don’t find the ‘laser-induced plasma ball’ explanation particularly convincing, either. The Nimitz UFO incident was in 2004, and this incident is perhaps the one which lends itself best to a ‘laser-induced plasma’ explanation; but that was 22 years ago, and there has been no evidence that this ‘laser-induced plasma’ technology has developed sufficiently well to be usable in warfare (or in entertainment) since that time.
We have a perfectly good explanation for UAP phenomena already; human fallibility and the Low Information Zone. There is no need at present to appeal to ‘currently secret wonder technology’ that has never been used in earnest (whether in conflict or for entertainment purposes).
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Unfortunately ball lightning is also inadequate as an explanation. The longest reliably-recorded example of ball lightning was less than two seconds long, so it is unlikely to explain sightings many seconds or minutes in length.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_lightning#Direct_measurements_of_natural_ball_lightning
That was for the WWII sightings at and around planes. For the most recent cases of Extra or Crypto the laser explanation is, as I said and to clarify, more geared towards some of the hard to explain incidents. Overall I do agree with you, a lot of the recent incidents do have prosaic explanations. One mentions lasers (for more recent cases) to point out that there are still more likely explanations than “it was extra or crypto aliens”.
Yes, it seems entirely possible that the Foo Fighter phenomenon was caused by high-flying WWII planes causing some sort of atmospheric phenomenon that followed them at relatively close range.
This sort of high-level propeller-driven flight is very rare nowadays, so maybe we don’t see this phenomenon any more. But I wouldn’t expect it to be ball lightning; perhaps a form of low-pressure electrical discharge, like neon light.
Ask for your best examples of what you are talking about several times, and the best you can do is “No, you!”?
I’d much rather have a strong example of what specifically you are talking about, if you don’t mind.
It can “seem” to be anything you want if you cherry pick speculation by people who weren’t there 80 years later.
Read the primary source documents, the first-hand accounts from the aircrews. Not what somebody who wasn’t there wrote about what they think happened. These were trained observers, smarter than the average bear and they were describing things that were not hallucinations, ball lightning or anything of the sort. They knew what ball lightning or static discharge displays were. There were myriad events of strange stuff that falls under the general description of “foo fighters”.
Not really, the latest pilots showed to be not reliable once better explanations of what they saw showed up. Also, as another doper reported in a different thread, even the old WWII pilots were not very good at reporting other incidents.
Recent research which compares the kill claims to recorded losses has confirmed the problem. An overclaiming in the region of 3-1 to 5-1 was common in the reports. There are many possible reasons for the overclaiming of kills to occur.
The most likely reason is that pilots and gunners were unable to accurately keep track of downed enemy planes during an aerial engagement. The speed and confusion of these battles along with the multiple hits from various guns would make it impossible to track any movements with particular accuracy.
There was also a very small minority of fighter pilots who would be able to remain completely calm during combat.
That is another thing repeated ad nauseum, with little to no evidence to back it up. A lot of UFOlogy consists of old bad examples often disproven but almost never discarded, which is why I continuously ask for the best examples of whatever woo is being pushed…and I almost never get those best examples.