I think there a LOTS of sightings that are not reported. It can be detrimental to an airline pilot's career to make such a report. But the recently released video of the US Navy pilots out over the Atlantic encountering those UFOs is very compelling to me. These were well trained and experienced pilots and they clearly had no idea what they were encountering. Amazing.
Not a pilot but even ordinary people - I think you are correct many sightings are not reported - I shared a UFO sighting with a neighbor in Oct or Nov 2015 and had no clue who to report it to, it was so surreal that it took my brain a long time to compute.
Our sighting made me wonder if and how UFO sightings and the loss of a loved one are related. We lived in a condo apartment building in Mississauga Ontario Canada, her condo was on the opposite end of the hall, I was at the other end, we both faced the same direction. Small world, this lady and I had worked together for a charter airline 10 years earlier and occasionally bumped into one another when we left for work in the am. We were on the 25th floor and the condo building has floor-to-ceiling windows on all outside walls, at the elevators we had a large floor to the ceiling window area that we could see most of the city clear to Toronto.
It was a low cloud dark day, no sunlight making it through a solid layer of clouds, and when I looked out the window I noticed two very very very large grey rectangular platforms hovering under the clouds over Lake Ontario, if they were moving it was very slow but it looked as if they were floating. The lake was about 10km away and these two "sheets" looked to be the size of football fields. I could not take my eyes off of them and immediately thought they were some type of weather balloon or something like that, THEN the two rectangles tilted sideways in UNISON, flew so fast sideways / on an angle, and then leveled and slowly tipped side to side, similar to how a pilot will tip the wings left and then right to say hello/goodbye, all in unison. The two units then leveled out to flat again and my neighbor came around the corner I asked if she could see what I see, she said she had been watching them from her condo windows too and they freaked her out, she said they came so close to her window and all of a sudden went out over the lake in a split second.
The elevator came and we got on, by the time I resurfaced from the underground parking I could not see them any longer. I searched online and found other sightings that were termed the death platform and a pic of a grey very large flat object in the sky, the only difference is that we saw 2 of them, all other sightings were by individual people and only saw 1 platform.
I had lost my father about 3 months before this sighting, my neighbor had lost her sister 4 months before the sighting, we both had an abundance of airline and aircraft experience and the lasting impression was it made me feel like it was my Dad and her sister giving us the final goodbye - wingtip.
Still, to recall the memory it is hard to fathom what I saw, but we both saw the exact same thing in the sky, it was not a dream, we both understand the laws of flight well too and this was not anything we had seen before. She was adamant she did not believe in UFOs, I said it did not need to be aliens but for sure they were unidentified flying objects, to that she 100% agreed.
Bobbi Pearl