OK, I’ll say it. Either it’s a very well crafted bonfire tale, or those seperate crews and their airplanes, radars and sensors encountered something unusual.
As for what it was: we can’t tell from a random encounter. My gut feeling, and it’s just my storyteller’s habits quicking in, is that those were human time travelers from the future.
Why? Shoddiness. Take the future where time travel is possible in certain limited conditions. SOME travelers still will be assholes, still will be shoddy, still will let “primitives” see them and their business. Just mind you, they may not come from our timeline, from OUR future.
But, aliens? No. We’re not that interesting. And probably by the time a society is advanced enough to cross the vastness of space in a sensible amount of time and meet other societies, they just figured better ways to do it.
Think of this: an isolated tribe in a secluded valley dreams of a sort of flying machines that would let them go beyond the mountain ranges enclosing their world. Yet one day, they accidentally invent radio and discover they’re in 2017 and there’s a ton of things going on outside of their valley, and they don’t need transportation devices to reach out, only communication devices.
As in, once a civilization invents the “ansible”, they discover they’re not alone but all other civilizations are so crazy away that visiting them is unfeasible… but still can talk with each other.
“Dudes, welcome the latest ansible civilization, they call themselves Human, their home they call it Earth and we’re still trying to figure where they are. They make some awesome music (for those who can appreciate music), have killed each other for nonsense endless times (hailing you the crazy ones) and have sexual reproduction, which we all know it’s the funniest”
And now I sign off before my mind starts soaring too high and this gets actual weird.