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It makes hallucinations much less plausible, but I don't think it really does much about misidentified balloons, glare, something on the camera lens, camera image-sharpening algorithms combining with those others, etc. See the videos in this Metabunk thread for examples. I don't think congressmen have any special skills to distinguish whether a fast-moving blob on an aircraft camera is a spacecraft or a visual artifact. And while people like pilots and intelligence agents might be better, it isn't really their area of expertise either. They're focused on dealing with real planes, not every weird visual artifact that can happen. On the scale of a country you can cherrypick enough things that coincidentally seem alien-like to be convincing to many people, including many government officials. But if it's ultimately all formed out of random noise you'll never get that definitive piece of evidence, just lots of "that blob was crazy and we couldn't figure out another explanation", which is the pattern we've seen.
Probably the most compelling example of a UFO encounter, the Nimitz incident, has multiple corroborating sources of information (sensors and human visual identification) suggesting behavior outside the bounds of known technology. From Fravor's testimony:
Here you have 4 people (the original crew, Fravor et al) and radar and the FLIR video the second flight crew took (after the object appeared to go 60 miles in under a minute), all indicating that something very strange is happening. Obviously that doesn't prove it's aliens, but I think it makes the sensor glitch/camera smudge theory untenable given the multiple independent systems that interacted with the object.
Fravor has admitted to playing pranks with his F-18 to try to make people think they were seeing a UFO. It is beyond me why people would take any of his UFO reports seriously. It's negligent that most news reports don't mention this about him.
https://www.metabunk.org/threads/commander-david-fravor-faking-ufo-encounters-in-california-desert.10947/
https://youtube.com/watch?v=Eco2s3-0zsQ&t=2939s
The fact that he played pranks on people to make them think they saw UFOs seems like weak evidence for a long-term commitment to deceiving people about his own experience up to the point of committing perjury, backed up by other members of his squad and when someone else took a video of it after he had landed.
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Multiple glitches happening at the same time are entirely possible. Combine this with power of suggestion and so on and you can get amazing results.
Sensor glitches may be for example software bugs.
There are limits to how far I'm willing to bend over backward in order to find a boring explanation. I'm pretty sure they didn't pull up within half a mile of a software bug, check it with naked eyes, and watch it make them eat dust.
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