In their case the thing they all described blocked out the stars almost from horizon to horizon as it passed over. It was described as huge, black, and silent with a well-defined edge that one could follow across the sky as the stars in front were blocked and those behind reappeared. They said they didn't notice it until they realized all the normal night sounds had completely stopped as it approached and once it passed, the insects, birds and things resumed their chatter. They don't know what they saw but they do know they did see something unusual.
Sounds like ... a cloud? Combined with some kind of local changes in temperature/pressure/ionization sufficient to distract the animals for a bit? (I live partially in nature - sometimes the critters are very active; other times, one can hear a pin drop).
I would think that people who spend a large part of their lives outside working a small farm/ranch after their day jobs would recognize a cloud if they saw one no matter the time of day.
I acknowledge that a cloud would block the view of everything behind it but in this case I'm pretty sure it wasn't a cloud.
The thing is clouds sometimes have unusual formations, appear at surprising altitudes and move very quickly (or appear to, if one misjudges the altitude).
As I'm sure they've been told already. I'm not denying their perceptions; and of course I wasn't there. It's just that my threshold of proof for extraterrestrial vehicles is ... quite high.
And sometimes unexplained observations are just that -- unexplained.
I understand the high bar that people set for situations like this. I am a geophysicist by education. It wasn't clouds. They've seen a lot of clouds and stars etc. and grew up around machines and animals.
I left out some of the details on purpose since the whole story is not mine to tell. They told me because they knew that I had done a lot of reading about the subject when other friends had something odd happen to them and they hoped that my physics studies would help them understand some of it better.
Some things are just unexplainable with our conventional knowledge. Over time that should/could change. If we already knew everything there would be no more need for science as curiosity about unfamiliar things could be satisfied by a simple query of existing knowledge. It would be a boring reality with no novelty or mysteries. In the worst case, a small group of people would control access to knowledge, withholding key information that would empower the rest of the people by helping them understand how all the mysteries of the world fit together to form our boring reality where every question has a clear, unique answer. Luckily we are nowhere near that point and there are many things left to be discovered.
Sounds like ... a cloud? Combined with some kind of local changes in temperature/pressure/ionization sufficient to distract the animals for a bit? (I live partially in nature - sometimes the critters are very active; other times, one can hear a pin drop).