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.
