Well, lets say this happened a decade ago, it's not like there haven't been multiple person sightings prior to camera phones. Do you know a group of people that wouldn't troll about something like that? Remember this is a hypothetical scenario.
Honestly, I don't know. I still have a tendency to think they were fooled somehow, but again, who knows?
To tell you the truth, and I am not trolling here I swear, I was part of a 7 person group that saw a UFO one night.
We live in the country, so it was normal to see lights in the far away field at night. It was maybe around 11 pm, and some friends signaled us to come see them. They said one of the lights was slowly rising into the air. So we sat on the school steps, looking at the seemingly ascending light. We waited, and after maybe 10 minutes, it started coming towards us. Slowly. Silently.
There was sort a crescendo of tension. The closer it was geting, the more obvious it was becoming. The sinking feeling that something abnormal was going on, because a plane cannot fly so low and be so silent. At this point, no one was talking. I remember sitting on a step that was half illuminated by a nearby light, and the other half cast in a shadow. Once the object was almost overhead, I slowly shifted my weight, as if I could conceal my presence from the aliens.
That is when one of the guys snapped, started screaming and running away. Immediately, we all got up and started running towards my house.
The UFO was moving in the same direction as us. We were 7 teenagers, running silently in the dead of night, with a triangular craft moving no more than 15 km per hour gliding above us at at least 100 m in the air. We could see it's undercarriage, faintly illuminated by a couple of colored lights. From that, we could clearly see it was a matte and metallic. While we took refgse in my mothers house, the craft kept on flying, towards the US border.
Going from the moment of pure terror, to this release of energy and being witness to this unbelievable sight was utter exhilaration. I went on to believe in aliens and UFOs for at least another 3 years, based on that experience.
What happened? What made me into a skeptic? I think it was a distancing from the whole thing. I decided to apply critical thinking to this experience, and decided that I could not possible conclude this was anything extraordinary, and classified it as unexplained. The point is, I can, and will probably never know what we saw that night. It was most probably some sort of glider that makes no sound at all doing an unusual nighttime run. I just don't feel comfortable saying "it was an alien UFO", even if people from that group still say that.
The moral of this story is, even when a group is face with a strange phenomena, can we really expect an objective assessment of the event? No. The feeling I felt that night were so intense, I have no doubt the others lived the same gamut as I did. I went an extra step and evaluated the experience, coming to the conclusion that it probably wasn't an alien spacecraft.
As a skeptic that has had a UFO encounter, I find myself well placed to know how these eyewitnesses feel. Knowing what know, and seeing what I been though, I cannot trust their accounts.
