Hoaxes happen and can cause a stir. But consider the technical difficulty of constructing a display in the sky comparable to high strangeness things reported by hundreds of credible witnesses. The energy densities, speeds and maneuverability apparent in certain high credibility sightings just can't be simulated with a few batteries and a balloon. It takes more to awe witnesses than hard core skeptics would like to admit.
I agree. If they pull this off with any success, at best, it’ll result in a few minor news bits and probably some reports of “UFOs” from “those dupes who believe in little green men a-and just LOOK how easy it was to fool them!” and then quickly forgotten. It’s not going to prove any sort of point except what we all know: mundane lights in the sky are easily and often mistaken for something perhaps a little more exotic.
Regarding the unheard of speeds, maneuverability, and overall weirdness usually reported with the small percentage of reports that are actually unexplainable, the skeptical attitude is frustrating, but kinda interesting.
Case in point, I was reading up on the O’Hare sighting recently and out of curiosity pulled up the comment thread from the archive of a certain news aggregation site that I've been a long time contributor/commenter on from it’s 2007 link to the original story. I feel like the people there more or less represent a good cross section of the general population and was curious about how that thread went down. Not so surprisingly, as it turned out, the skeptics chalked it up to a misidentified conventional aircraft. As the thread progressed the consensus (de)evolved into, more specifically, a misidentified B2. This, despite the fact, which was pointed out, that these things are based at Whiteman AFB in Missouri and, besides, probably didn't have any business flying at low altitude in the airspace of one of the country’s busiest commercial airports.
A few others also pointed out that the object was observed to be a disk, was hovering for several minutes, and made its eventual exit abruptly, vertically, and with enough energy to punch a hole in the cloud it went through. Oh, and that the witnesses were aircraft mechanics, airline managers, and a few pilots. You know, people who have worked around aircraft for years and probably know a thing or two about the typical aircraft you usually see flying around.
Most of these posts were ignored or outright mocked.
At any rate, I just find the psychology behind this sort of attitude fascinating. Ascribe sighting to conventional craft, even if that explanation requires a not-so-fair amount of credulity, ignore information that contradicts that explanation, point and laugh at the “tinfoil hat” folks, rinse, repeat.
