The old guy is one hell of a name-dropper, with all kinds of "deniability" to make it looks like he knows a lot that he can't disclose. The "friend of a friend" story about the pilot entering a UFO with transparent walls is a pretty good one, in particular. As someone who has spent thousands of hours looking at the night sky (though, admittedly, with a fairly narrow FOV when using telescopes), I can't say that I have ever seen anything that didn't have a rational plausible explanation. The most dramatic such sighting was a meteor that was so bright that it lit up the ground as I was setting up my scope, and left a trail of ionized gas that persisted for a long time, and slowly drifted off to the East, like the contrail from a jet would hang in the air.