Maybe I will crosslink to this pubski over there.

Another thing is people will e.g. listen to the audio of the pilots reacting to their HUD as though it is visible to the naked eye, and people's projections span the gap to "pilot saw".

I've seen the text on the UFO poster in the X-Files. I get it. I'm glad video editing software wasn't easy to get or use when I was of an age, because now, there are many, many /r/iwannabelieve's out there full of teenage kiddos who know how to video edit, and wanna believe so badly that they want others to believe fakes. Or just wanna have fun. But the very fact that people can disprove edits with e.g. cloud evolution problems or tineye searches and we still have yet to get that sweet, indisputable footage in the age of 6 billion smartphones is... glaringly obvious enough that I'm sure this point has been made on hubski before.

I'd have it skip over this rock with minimal reporting sent back home.

Ironically enough, one thing that a probe should do is take hi-res imaging of planets and detect unnatural satellites. Would be easy with enough optical tech, an algorithm would be trivial. It should see the pyramids, great wall, Dubai bullshit, the metroplexes even more clearly, and resolve man-made radio waves above the noise floor. We'd be resolved for sure if it passed between one of the Voyagers and Earth at some point.

On that note; At work? I should actually pursue an Oumuamua chaser mission. We have planetary, astrobio, imaging, and particle people in house, the only thing I think we'd definitely need to sub-contract all out somewhere else is the e- & b-field instruments. The biggest hurdle to this is the people who don't take it seriously, which, given that the worst case scenario is we science an extrasolar asteroid or comet, and the instrumentation need not differ too much, not sure what the drawback is. Win-win. Socially? It's kind of a cool litmus test to find the dreamers. Great excuse to network with some of the new people, too. Going to be hard to convince me that once we got the 'scopes good enough to sense objects of that size (~100 m), a thousand-year+ occurrence just happens to slice through the solar system within a few years. Ultimately, building an Oumuamua chaser would be the first step in building an Oumuamua. Everything about it, actually, right down to "as light as possible and with the biggest rocket possible". The chaser is even a little more challenging, in a sense, because you can't bank on being able to launch into the ecliptic plane and use gravity assists from other planets. The chaser has to find a way to intercept, probably can't bank on having an asymptotic chaser velocity above what the object does. I'm also not thinking about mass producing chasers, yet, as ya would for building an actual Oumuamua, but it is fun to consider.