An unidentified object passing within 100 to 150 feet of a military aircraft in level flight at 16,000 feet is, by any measure, a serious near-miss, and the fact that this account comes from two RAF pilots on an active air-to-air refuelling mission rather than a civilian observer on the ground gives it a degree of professional, trained-observer credibility that most reported aerial phenomena lack. Air-to-air refuelling is itself a precision operation requiring close, careful coordination between aircraft already flying in close proximity to one another, which makes an additional unidentified object entering that same airspace unannounced a genuinely serious safety concern quite apart from any question of its ultimate nature.
The detail that has drawn the most attention is the object's absence from radar throughout the encounter. A conventional aircraft, drone, or other solid object of any significant size passing that close to two RAF planes at that altitude would ordinarily be expected to register on the radar systems either aircraft or ground control were using, and its complete absence from that data, despite two independent pilots reporting a visual sighting close enough to be genuinely alarming, is exactly the kind of documented discrepancy that keeps a case like this open rather than easily explained away.
As with most modern military UFO reports, official mechanisms for logging and investigating unusual sightings by service pilots exist precisely because incidents like this occur with some regularity, and a near-miss of this precision, without a corresponding radar contact, sits uncomfortably between an easy dismissal and a confirmed unexplained phenomenon. Cromer's stretch of the North Sea, already carrying its own older folklore of drowned villages and warning bells beneath the waves, has in this case produced a considerably more contemporary and considerably better documented kind of strangeness in the sky directly above it.
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