he most ardent skeptic would have difficulty explaining.
I've heard a lot of them try and I've heard them all fail.

At nine-forty on the evening of the twenty-ninth an Air Defense
Command radar station in central Michigan started to get plots on a
target that was coming straight south across Saginaw Bay on Lake
Huron at 625 miles an hour. A quick check of flight plans on file
showed that it was an unidentified target.

Three F-94's were in the area just northeast of the radar station,
so the ground controller called one of the F-94's and told the pilot
to intercept the unidentified target. The F-94 pilot started climbing
out of the practice area on an intercept heading that the ground
controller gave him. When the F-94 was at 20,000 feet, the ground
controller told the pilot to turn to the right and he would be on the
target. The pilot started to bring the F-94 around and at that
instant both he and the radar operator in the back seat saw that they
were turning toward a large bluish-white light, "many times larger
than a star." In the next second or two the light "took on a reddish
tinge, and slowly began to get smaller, as if it were moving away."
Just then the ground controller called and said that he still had
both the F-94 and the unidentified target on his scope and that the
target had just made a tight 180-degree turn. The turn was too tight
for a jet, and at the speed the target was traveling it would have to
be a jet if it were an airplane. Now the target was heading back
north. The F-94 pilot gave the engine full power and cut in the
afterburner to give chase. The radar operator in the back seat got a
good radar lock-on. Later he said, "It was just as solid a lock-on as
you get from a B-36." The object was at 4 miles range and the F-94
was closing slowly. For thirty seconds they held the lock-on; then,
just as the ground controller was telling the pilot that he was
closing in, the light became brighter and the object pulled away to
break the lock-on. Without breaking his transmission, the ground
controller asked if the radar operator still had the lock-on because
on the scope the distance between two blips had almost doubled in one
sweep of the antenna. This indicated that the unknown target had
almost doubled its speed in a matter of seconds.

For ten minutes the ground radar followed the chase. At times the
unidentified target would slow down and the F-94 would start to close
the gap, but always, just as